How do you make Potter Puppet Pals Puppets?

Answer

I made a full set of replicas of the Potter Puppet Pals for my eldest daughter for X-Mas '07 (see http://radio.weblogs.com/0151290/2008/01/11.html#a194 for a picture).

Each puppet took roughly about 10 hours to make. I designed each of the faces and hair by watching the various Puppet Pals videos many, many, many times, and tracing various screen shots. Do you know that "The Mysterious Ticking Noise" has been watched on YouTube around 27 million times? One million of those times was me watching it to get screen shots to copy....

I am fairly happy with the puppets and Hermione, Ron and Voldemort in particular turned out really well.

Each puppet has at its core a wooden dowel with part of a popsicle stick glued on at the top to form a "t" shape. The top of the "t" is inside the head of the puppet. The top bar of the "t" allows the entire puppet to rotate properly when you twirl the rod. The "t" was inserted into the pre-sewn head through the bottom of the long neck tube then I stuffed it very firmly with poly stuffing wads poked in with a knitting needle. Then I sewed shut the bottom of the neck tube. The black robes were sewn separately, then sewn to the neck tube to complete the puppet. The robes are slightly longer than the dowel rod.

The puppets are made out of felt and the facial details are painted on with fabric paint. Voldemorts eyes were first painted red, and while the paint was still wet I sprinkled on red ultra fine poly glitter (then vacuumed up the excess after the fabric paint dried). I then outlined his eyes in black and added the black pupils. Harry's glasses were painted white, with opalescent poly glitter sprinkled on the wet paint. Voldemort's eyes look fantastic in the way they reflect the light. I am very fond of Voldemort-the-puppet. He has a great personality.

The Gryffindor badge on the puppets was something I found on the internet and I just scaled it appropriately and printed it out, cut it out, and glued it on to the robes.

Each puppet has a piece of white "loop" velcro sewed to each hand. This is so that they can "hold" props like wands (to make wands I bought el cheapo kids paint brushes and cut the handles off and wrapped the thicker end of the handle with black "hook" velcro such that it would stick to the loop velcro on the puppets' hands). The puppets also have a thin strip of elastic tacked on by the ends such that the elastic lies across the puppet's palm. A rod with a loop on an end of it can be hooked on to this elastic and then used to move the puppet's arm.

The hardest thing about the puppets was Snape's friggin' nose and his hair. I got the nose 90% perfect after much trial and error and the hair around 70% correct. I also got better at facial proportions as I made the puppets. You can kind of tell I made Harry first because the bottom of his face isn't as round as it should be.

I don't normally use patterns for any crafts I do...I don't like my originality to be fettered by someone else's ideas. In this case though my daughter really loves the PPP so I tried very hard to be as true to the originals as I could. She is quite happy with the results, and her friends are wild about them.

Hope this summary is useful to others who might want to try their hand at copying the Potter Puppet Pals.

First answer by ID3472405303. Last edit by Absinthes blog. Contributor trust: 10 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 21 [recommend question]