Finger Puppets

who doesn’t love finger puppets?! i don’t know about you, but personally i am a fan of anything cute and mini! so i was inspired a few months ago when i saw the most adorable finger puppets on martha stewart’s website…check them out here:

http://www.marthastewart.com/article/felted-finger-puppets

i immediately knew that i wanted to make them as a gift for our sweet friend, Adam’s, first birthday. so just this week i attempted. here’s the finished product.

martha uses wool fleece (also know as wool roving) to make the base of the puppet, but all the wool roving i found in my area was WAY pricey…so i just decided to use some of my leftover felt from the playhouse (being that i have a huge mountain of it!)

i folded a piece of felt sideways over my index finger and trimmed the approximate shape. i pinned where i wanted my stitches to be. i only had to sew the one side because the other side is on the fold. while sewing, i curved the top a bit to go around the curve of the finger. (i had to work at that some because sometimes i got more of a point then a curve.)

here’s a pic after its been sewn and trimmed, but before flipping. you can see that i cut each base with pinking shears to give it a nice edge.

i then flipped them right side out.

i cut out details from felt, and hot glued them in place on the front of the base of the puppet, with the sewn seam in the center back. (martha’s website has some templates for a few of the details.) for the rest of the details, i pretty much winged it…wasting quite a bit of felt along the way! the eyes are dots made from a skinny sharpie. if i ever figure out how, i’ll post some templates for more detailed parts. i’m still new to the blogging thing, so i’ll have to research how to do that. if you are interested in that, leave me a comment.

here’s another look…thanks to “the boy” who served as my hand model!

have fun making a super cute and inexpensive gift/toy!!