Misadventures In Puppet Building (Sketch to Foam)

A professional puppet builder would probably cringe at our chaos; however, taking into account the fact that we've never made a puppet, didn't buy a pattern, and have a limited knowledge of puppets, I say we are off to a better than expected start.

Foam is expensive.  We did not even get the foam we wanted.  We settled for the 1" thick roll of polyfoam from the craft section at Walmart just in case our puppet making adventure was a complete flop, we didn't want to be out of a lot of money.  Excited to have the foam finally, we came home and stared at it.  How in the world are we going to make a big round minion outta this stuff????  I thought making a puppet pattern would be simple.  Needless to say, it was quite the time consuming project.  I'm quite certain we went about it all the wrong way, but we eventually got a puppet that somewhat resembles our original sketch.

We started by taking thin poster board and trying to form it into the shape we wanted for our puppet.  Originally, these seemed like the simple and obvious way to create a pattern.  Unfortunately, poster board doesn't bend and form together as easily as foam so we abandoned that idea all together.  I was all ready to post a quick article about our failure when inspiration struck!  A baseball hat is the same shape as the minion on a much smaller scale.  We tore a part a baseball hat to get the pattern for one of the pieces.  After a ton of geometry and mathematics, we finally came up with a pattern for our head.  We cut out six pieces (because the hat was six pieces) but only ended up needing, five pieces to complete the top of the head.

Naively, we rejoiced assuming everything else would be relatively simple in comparison to the head.  Then, we realized figuring out how to make the mouthplate was going to be much more difficult.    The mouth plate does not function exactly the way it should.  There's a trick to getting the mouth to open and close.  It was the best we could do with our amateurish puppet building skills. 

The arms are hot glued on to the puppet and therefore, are not able to be moved with rods.  This was intentional.  Because puppets are so large and bulky and require two hands to move the mouth plate, we chose to make the arms stationary.