Puppet Craft

Learn to make puppets with your fingers, socks, felt, paper and almost anything else you can lay your hands on!

Puppets are great for playing with and for telling stories. With this collection of different kinds of puppets to make, you can now bring your favourite characters to life and liven up parties and class projects. All you need is this book, some material you will find around the house and tons of imagination!

The step—by—step instructions and easy—to—follow sketches make this book ideal for use at home or in the classroom.

Neetu Sharma is an educationist. She has held workshops in puppet-making and story-telling. She has written and illustrated short stories for children. Neetu is also an artist with several exhibitions to her credit.

Puppetry Is possibly one of the most ancient forms of art and entertainment and has its roots in tribal societies. Puppetry involves the use of movable toys controlled by one or several puppeteers. This may be through several methods like strings, rods or shadows. The voice of a puppeteer adds life to a puppet.

Although some puppets are extremely complex, the puppets in this book have been made using easily available material and are simple to make. A few tips on how to use this book are given below.

1. Use of templates:

A design that can be used as a framework to make the puppet has been provided at the end of most chapters in the templates section.

• The template patterns given in the book may be traced on buffer paper and transferred on to a pastel sheet, felt etc. with white or yellow carbon.
• To enlarge the templates to a bigger size, a photocopier or scanner can be used.
• The templates have been labelled with the name of the body part, colour and number of pieces (P) required.

Eyes

Eye templates have been provided in the templates section. Googly eyes give more life to a puppet. Some sock puppets have table tennis balls turned into eyes. Other sock puppets have eyes made out of buttons. The size of the puppet is an important consideration while pasting eyes.

Adhesive

After applying adhesive on an area, clips and pins to keep the pieces in also to stick the pieces quickly.
Paper may require 5 to 10 minutes of drying time after application of adhesive.
Felt, cloth, wool and socks will require fabric glue to stick and will require at least 30 minutes of drying time.

Hair

Hair for the puppet may be made straw, cotton or even paper. To look interesting, long, short and hair can be fixed on them.

Explaining common terms used in the book
a. Transparency
b. pastel sheets
a. Also abbreviations like (MB, P, I)

The material used in this book such as pastel sheets, transparencies, googly eyes etc. are easily available at stationery stores.