Making Puppets

So you want to start a puppet ministry, but you don't have the money for the exorbitant prices charged by some companies for puppets. Maybe you want your puppets to have their own personality--as opposed to using something mass produced and probably used by a myriad of other church puppet groups. Or perhaps you live in a part of the world where puppets are not readily available.

In truth, all three of the above challenges apply to our ministry here in Brazil. In the face of these difficulties, we have found the following resources to be of great help.

1. Puppeteer Paul Muller has posted an outstanding series of videos on how to build puppets. Anybody who is interested in making puppets should watch it. The puppets produced are very basic, and use easy-to-find materials.

2. If you are interested in starting out with some classy patterns for some really nice looking puppets, no place is better than Project Puppet. The patterns they sell are reasonably priced, and easy to use.

We have taken aspects from both of these outstanding sources, as well as things learned from disecting a few Puppet Productions puppets, to make the puppets for our project. We are still in the process of character development, but below is the latest effort.



Do any of you have other sources for patterns or materials? Let us know!