I threaded up some big embroidery needles with embroidery floss, and gave him some sweater scraps to use as patches (why yes, I do have a bag of old sweaters in my closet just for the purpose of things like this!) I showed him what to do, and did a few stitches to get him started, and he did great! Here’s a poor cell phone photo of him in action..

I think the patches actually add a great deal of interest to the original snake. He’s also re-named the snake “Patches”. One of the eye buttons had broken, too, so we replaced the buttons with some eyes I’d gotten from the lovely Colleen at Some Art Fabric (who has actually made a sweater snake in the past!). I’m loving Snake 2.0! Here’s the how-to on how to make the snake, if you’d like one yourself!
He loves his snake, and he loves that he did it himself (with a bit of help from mom here and there).

This would be a great project to do with friends for your own craft night, or to make with kids.

Behold! The Flying Purple People Eater and the Fluffy-head –>

This tutorial is less ‘step by step’ than my usual ones, since the object is not to create what I created, but to make your own monster up!

So, what do you need?

• Sweaters, preferably already shrunken/felted. You’ll need a sleeve that is big enough to be the body of your puppet.
• Scrap felt/sweaters to make your embellishments.
• Eyes – either safety toy eyes, buttons, or you can make out of the felt scraps if you like. That’s of course assuming your monster has eyes! (I was lucky enough to have a few toy eyes that the lovely Colleen from Some Art Fabric had given me, and they worked great!)
• Embroidery thread.

First, pick your sleeve. You can use a solid color (we both did purple here) or stripes, or whatever works for your monster. Cut off the sleeve, trimming the part near the shoulder so it is even all around (like a giant sock).

Next, plan your head. We did a couple of different things here, but here are a few options:
1) Square – just turn inside out, and sew the cuff together in a straight line.
2) Curved – sleeve inside out, trim a curved line, and stitch together.
3) Rounded – See the example below. Although my ‘spikes’ should have been shorter. It was pretty messy, but that was ok, since I was adding a horn.
4) Fluffy – See the example below – with sleeve right side out, gather a few inches from the top. Weave thread back and forth, and pull tight. Afterwards, you can cut the cuff to resemble hair! (Note, in the pictures, this was done after creating the mouth. Either way works)
One thing we would do, in hindsight, would be to stitch in some scraps or padding in the inside of the top of the head. This would help the head stand up better on a small hand.

You’ll also need a mouth. Here’s a couple we did:
The Fluffyhead has a mouth with lips, created by turning the puppet inside out and stitching an oval of fabric on the inside.
The People Eater’s “scary” mouth was done by whipstitching on the mouth from the outside.

The rest is all embellishment and adding personality.

Arms: Since ours were for 3.5 year olds, we decided against arms, as they are hard for small kids to manipulate. If you like you could just stitch on non-functional arms.
Horn: For the people eater, I made the horn by cutting out a circle of sweater fabric, cutting a 2/3 “pie piece” out of it, and wrapping it into a cone. Very trial and error. I stuffed it with a few fabric scraps and stitched it on top of the head with a whip stitch.
Eyes: Sew on buttons, press on toy eyes, cut fabric circles for eyes… For the People eater I used a fabric circle cut out of felted sweater, made a hole in the center for the post of the toy eye, and pressed it through. Then I used a blanket stitch to attach the felted circle to the head.
Nose: Holly’s Fluffyhead had a couple of felt circles bunched and stitched on in the center. You could also do buttons, or whatever.
Other: I cut out wings out of sweater material and used a simple straight stitch (it was getting late!) to sew them to the sides of the People Eater Body. Holly attached a felt star to the belly of the Fluffy head. Use your imagination here!

The finished puppets!

Hope you enjoyed this and it gave you some ideas for a fun evening of puppet making!

Related:

• Octo-puppet – this one is more of a typical tutorial, making an octopus puppet out of old sweaters and buttons.
• Sweater snake
• Elephant Purse

I love to make homemade gifts, and I had some fabulous die-cut felted sweaters that the lovely Colleen had graciously allowed me to cut up on her die cut machine a few weeks ago. So I did a cute appliqued elephant onesie for the baby-to-be’s shower, and for the 2 little girl birthday parties I made pins.

I’ll have a tutorial on making the pins up later this week!!

Related: Free Download- Squid Valentine Cards.

So, in honor of Cephalopod week, here is another order of calamari in watercolor form.

And–since I think it’s the only cephalopod I’ve made craft-wise, I should re-introduce Henri the Hexapus… He’s a pupput and/or a stuffed toy made from recycled sweaters and lots of annoying to sew on buttons…. Go make one today (Tutorial here)!

We documented the process, so here it is. You’ll see both of the prototype ornaments we made in the steps. Tutorial below pictures.

(PS: We have some great guest blogger how-to’s coming over the next few days!!)

1. Felt and old wool sweater (shrink it!)., 2. Cut our your ornament shapes, 3. Cut a ‘window’ in one of your two halves, 4. Materials: sweater material, old plastic packaging, embroidery thread, ribbon or thread for hanging, 5. Cut a square out of your packagin slightly larger than the window., 6. sew the window on to your sweater, 7. Window sewn in, 8. Stitch the two pieces together,, 9. Leave a space large enough to stuff/insert picture., 10. Stich around the window to cover your thread, 11. Ready to stuff: insert picture, and stuff, and then stitch closed, 12. Hang on tree!

Materials:
Old wool sweaters, felted. I washed these in the washing machine with hot water and they shrunk nicely. Just google for felting sweaters if you need more info.
Flexible clear plastic – repurpose packaging from kids toys or similar. Mine was a bag from a diaper bag set.
Pictures
Embroidery thread
Ribbon (for hanging or embellishing)
Stuffing (polyfil or whatever you have on hand, even extra sweater scraps)

Cut out 2 matching ornament shapes from the body of the sweater.
Cut a ‘window’ in one of your two halves slightly smaller than your picture.
Cut a square out of your plastic slightly larger than the window.
Sew the window on to your sweater – I machine stitched this, but you can save a step and just sew on by hand with embroidery thread. (If your fabric has an obvious front and back, be sure to sew the ‘window’ plastic to the back of the fabric)
Stitch the two pieces together using a blanket stitch. Sew in a loop of ribbon when you get to the top, and leave an opening at the bottom for stuffing and to insert the picture (note, you can insert the picture, tacking it in with tape or glue, prior to this step if you like)
For extra interest, I stitched around the window to cover my thread. (I didn’t do the neatest job sewing it on the machine!)
Insert your picture in through the bottom hole. (I didn’t do anything to secure it, just stuffed behind it and it seemed secure enough)
Stuff and then stitch closed. I had a little extra ribbon, so I added a tassel on the bottom when I was closing up the bottom.
If you’re really good, embroider the year on the back.
All ready to wrap for a gift or hang on the tree!

Henri is a fun little puppet made out of recycled sweater sleeves – more on Henri here.. If you liked the hand drawn tutorial for the Monster Wreath, you might like this too!

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:

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.

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

Well, this is a Baby Ele-purse, and her name is Ginny. Please welcome her into the world.
I envisioned the pattern for this one the other day, and couldn’t stop myself from attempting immediately. Except for the strap, she’s made entirely from one felted sweater sleeve. If you guys are interested, I’ll do a tutorial..

This was a fun project, and The Boy loves it.

The Process:
(You can see the original sweater used, in this previous post)
I held up a wine bottle to the sleeve to get an idea of the length, and cut it off with a bit to spare for hemming on the bottom. I though a different color would be cute for the bottom, so I used a scrap left over from the first elephant purse. And grosgrain ribbon left over as well for the (poorly tied) bow.

The sleeve was wider than I liked, and got wider as it went up, so I turned it inside out and machine stiched up one side, so it was more of a rectangle (tube). You don’t have to be exact with a project like this–i didn’t measure, I just estimated. Then I cut out a circle of the light green sweater material, with a diameter of an inch or so wider than the width of the tube. Keeping the tube wrong side out, I machine stiched the circle onto the tube. Again, this was a quick and dirty job. Turning right side out you get a nice round finished bottom.

The top of the bag is already finished, since it’s the end of the sleeve, but I added the ribbon to close the bag. Here I was very lazy, but you could do something more finished–I only had about 10 minutes til the party!– I just snipped holes in the sleeve a few inches from the top, and threaded the ribbon through. That of course won’t hold up very well, but I figured a wine bag wasn’t going to get heavy use.

And that’s it! Cheap, easy, and looks spiffy!

*10 points if you get the title reference :)

If you remember from before, here’s my original sweater haul:

Here is the sweater I chose for this purse, after felting*, and the process is below:

The process was pretty much the same as for the original Ele-purse. Click here for details. The only differences were that I wanted to just use the yellow for the trunk (there was an orange stripe on the sleeves that went to a different project, you’ll see that later), which necessitated a slightly smaller bag. The ears are made from the very top of the sleeves, which happened to be pink. I could have also cut them out of the scraps from the body, but they happened to be almost exactly the right size, and allowed for a little trim of orange on them.
In retrospect, i wish I had sewn the trunk a little skinnier, up to where the ribbing starts.

But all in all, a fun, easy, and cute project!

*I felted just by washing in hot in the washing machine, with a dab of soap.