February 5, 2009
Valentine :: something old
This is another Valentine's day gift I made a couple of years ago. This one just "happened" as I was trying to make one of these. I remember I found I had made the neck part way too long. Next, I turned the neck part into a body, added some pipe cleaners to the back to make arms and legs, as shown in the diagram. I cut the pipe cleaners to the right size and bended them to form hands and feet. The hands, I covered with the same skin-colored fabric as I used for the head.
The rest you can see in the photo: I gave the little guy some pants, little boots, a pointed hat, a scarf and a jacket (for the buttons I used French knots - you can check here for a nice how-to) - all felt. No patterns involved, all very intuitively! I just added the details as I went along. I drilled some holes in a little piece of wood to make the swing, and as it was close to Valentine's Day I added the heart... I didn't do this, but when you want to make sure the little guy stays put, you can glue him onto the swing. All this maybe took me a couple of hours at most.
If you're not familiar with making Waldorf dolls, you can find some instructions for making the head here (as this puppet is kind of small, I would leave out the nose, though). For a small puppet like this one you can use tubular gauze (finger splint padding) to be found at the pharmacy section of your supermarket.
A final note, maybe: since this puppet has a lot of small parts it's not intended to be given to young children to play with. We have ours hung up by the window in one of our girls' room...