Puppet, part two

Good morning!

Thought I would share how the puppet is coming along. I haven't progressed toooo much since before because I haven't got a great deal of money, plus I was without the glue gun until yesterday. Anyway, here's the next few steps...

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Step Eight

The next thing the face needed was the eyes, so I bought some plastic spoons from the pound shop and cut off two of the ends. I used something like eight spoons up because they kept cracking, so I decided to cut them with a little bit of a stem instead.

I then filed them down with a nail file (too lazy to buy sandpaper) which took ages and I breathed in plastic dust and practically choked to death. But they ended up looking like this.

As you can see, I made a black strip for the eye line and some pink felt (the same as the tongue) for the eye lids.  The photos down below show the gluing process where I just tucked them in behind.

Step Nine

After adding a pupil, I then pinned the eyes either side to where I wanted them. I tried to take my time with that because I didn't want to get them wonky....

...However when I glued them they are slightly off but never mind. So here are a few pictures of the unnamed head, complete with eyes. 

Step Ten

Obviously my puppet now needed a body so it wasn't a floating pea head. I couldn't find any body templates online, so sort of had to make it up using a photo I’d seen:

I forgot to take any photos of it cut out because it was stressing me out, but basically I cut out the darkest bits that would then give the body shape, as you can see below.

It was a bit trial and error and had to keep cutting the odd piece off and glue random bits to each other. Here is the body with the head on too, along with added eyebrows to give a little extra character.

Step Eleven

The body looks so odd with no arms, so I needed to decide how I was going to make those, which is when I chose to make a sort of foam bone with cotton wadding flesh, and then pink fabric skin. Firstly, I wanted to start with the hands to work out a scale, so I searched the web for a good hand to copy before realising I could just copy my own...

 I cut out four of these.

Then I glued them together with a piece of foam on the front and one on the back to give depth, before trimming this down (albeit not that neatly) to give it curve and volume.

Step Twelve

For the bones in the arms I used scrap strips of foam, not having a lot left, just the length of a ruler for simplicity. 

Taking a sort of rhombus of wadding, I wrapped the bone up so that one end was slightly thinner than the other.

I then got a rectangle of the pink fleece that I used for the head and made two pieces that were 300mm long, at one end 120mm, and the other end 100mm. 

You can't really tell, but they are slightly tapered one end. I took the fleshed out arms and wrapped them in the fleece, making sure the tapered ends of each matched up. Then I sewed them up using the same stitch as before, like sew (heheheh)...

Once finished they looked like really long sausages, but clearly they bend and taper to one end like arms should. I am going to sew a few stitches in the middle to make a subtle elbow, but I need to measure them out right with the body first and as I said before, the body is stressing me out.

Now I haven't covered the hands yet, because it's stupidly difficult and I've tried like three times and I am really struggling and seriously considering the puppet wearing gloves, haha. However I would like to do it properly purely because I don't want it to look like a mime/Michael Jackson.

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So that's it for now. Next time I will be hopefully making hair, buying clothes, and deciding what I want to do with those stupid hands... Until then!