Finally! the ‘how to’ on how to create Henri! a fun little puppet made out of recycled sweater sleeves – more on Henri here.. I’ll post some pics of the finished Henri in action tomorrow.

So, I promised instructions, hopefully these are understandable. This can be modified to do a stuffed toy rather than a puppet by simply stuffing the head fully, and then sewing up the secondary sweater where the legs meet.

Click through to see/download the full size instructions.

Materials needed:
Two coordinating sweaters, felted. 1 sleeve from each.
Felt for eyes
Buttons (if you’re up for the fun of sewing on all those suckers!)
Embroidery thread
I sewed everything but the embellishments on the machine.

Prototype Henri:

If you try him, please let me see your results, and you can post to the new flickr group : http://www.flickr.com/groups/dabbled/

OK, he’s actually a hexapus, since he only has 6 legs. And he was named after the Hexapus discovered in Britain (Henry), except for some reason my hubby keeps calling him Henri, so that is his name. I guess he’s french ;)

He’s entirely made out of two recycled sweater sleeves, a ton of buttons, and some scrap felt. I had the idea back in January and had made progress on actually doing something in early March

I was planning to make this a stuffed toy, but my toddler got ahold of the partially finished Henri and proclaimed “Muppet!!” while sticking his hand up the center. (He’s addicted to muppets and sesame street on youtube). So a puppet Henri shall be.

I’ve still got one leg of buttons to finish (what a pain!) and to stuff him slightly.
I’ll also be writing up a tutorial on how to create your own… :)

Don’t forget about the Anti-Valentines Day contest — get to work!