Reply To Comments: You Don’t Need to Buy!

Homemade puppets are easy –very easy- to make. And then You can add in extra things which will make the puppet more useful to you. It only takes about an hour to hour and a half to make each. If you have an over-locker that can sew the mouth together (step 2), this would be even quicker.

Materials needed:
An adult sock, not torn
Felt or cloth
Bit of carton
White glue
Bit of doll stuffing
Contact cement glue or other strong glue
“eyes” (glue-on, sew-on, or buttons)
Other decorations, including probably yarn for hair

Step one: Take an adult-sized sock, and cut the foot lengthwise. Cut larger for an adult, smaller is a child will be the main user. (Or cut adult in any case.)


Step 2: Then open the cut and place open onto a piece of felt or cloth. Mark around and cut. Turn the sock inside-out, and with right sides together, stitch the mouth-felt to the sock mouth-hole. Turn sock back to right side.
Step 3: Again draw-measure each half of the mouth (top/ bottom) on a piece of carton. Cut out carton, trim accurately to size. Then put white glue on one side of the carton, and holding the sock open as much as you can, glue each of the two pieces of carton (gluey-side) to the inside of the felt mouth.
Step 4: Put some stuffing inside the mouth
Step 5: Glue (contact cement) or sew eyes on. (If glued, set puppet aside for half an hour.)
Step 6: Make hair by taking a chair, and overturning it (so you have two polls). Attach the yarn to one leg (of chair, not you….) by wrapping it around the leg and maybe tying. Then wrap the yarn 3 times around the two legs, figure-eight style. Take a second piece of yarn and tie in the middle, letting the ends fall to the side. Repeat (from “then wrap”) as often as needed.


Make a final tie in the middle. Cut the yarn at each chair-leg and glue hair to puppet. Glue the hair solidly, not just in the middle, but a bit to the sides as well.
Step 7: Add any other desired decorations.

Try and be fun. Hair does not have to be brown or blonde, it can be firey red, blue, or green. The mouth can be any color. Have fun! ( I added a bit of beige cloth to the mouth of a puppet, to be the lone tooth left in a puppet who never brushed his teeth.)

Try This Tuesday - The Use of Puppets-Speech and Communication

Another benefit of puppets ( besides getting what you want) is that they are a terrific way to promote speech skills, and communication. Hopefully I will post about other uses of puppets next week.)

COMMUNICATION
Just as your child likes hearing “clean up this pigsty of a room!” better from Muppet than from you, your child may also feel more at ease telling about some incident of the day through puppets. If you suspect that your hesitant, yet verbal, child is upset about something, give him puppets to play with. You may even pretend to “do” something else, while keeping your ears “on alert”. Or you might play along, also with a puppet, creating a scenario that will allow him to express his feelings.

SPEECH SKILLS
Puppets are an excellent way to practice speech skills. Often a child or teen may hesitate to try certain things (in the realm of speech) in your presence, fearing that they will “slip up”. A puppet takes a bit of the pressure off the child, because if the puppet makes a mistake, that is the mistake of the puppet, not him. And besides all that, puppets are fun and cute!