Advanced Sock Puppets for Beginners

1. Intro: Puppets are full of character and personality, and they're not even hard to make when you start with basic materials like a sock puppet. This class will show you how to make sock puppets from the easiest of beginner puppets to something a bit more challenging for the more seasoned crafter. All while using commonly available supplies, that will cost you little to nothing. Hey, Filk, my name is Lucy, and I run a small business called Boho Creations, where I design dolls, plushies, and puppets for sewing and embroidery machines. I also have a degree in physics, and I worked as an engineer for many years. So experimenting and inventing new ways of doing things is, well, it's fun for me. It's what I like to do. We'll talk about many different materials you can use for a sock puppet and where to find them on a budget. Then we'll make three different puppets at different skill levels. These can be made by kids or adults and make a great party activity for all ages. At the end of the class, I'll show you some examples of more sock puppets you can make in case you want to take your skills even further. You can check out my website ballyhoo creations.com for patterns and videos. And of course, I would love for you to share your puppet as a class project or post any questions in the class discussion or comment section. Don't forget to leave a class review. So scavenge up a few materials at your house or make a quick run to the Dollar Store, and let's have some fun with sock puppets. 2. Project: Boom Our project for this class will be a sock puppet. You saw that coming, didn't you? Make any puppet from a sock, and it qualifies as your class project, snap a quick photo of your project, and upload it to the class project section so we can share with each other. Going to need at least one sock, new or old, but clean socks are preferred. No judging, no. If you have an old sock that has a lot of lint on it, you can use a ln brush or a ln shaver to remove the little pills and that'll make it much cleaner. And you can use different sizes of socks. You can use fuzzy socks or sweat socks or regular socks. It doesn't really matter. Knee highs give you a lot more sock to work with, but you can use cru socks or ankle socks as well. They're just a little more limited. You may have to stitch things together, you know. You see what I'm saying. You're also going to need something stiff to make a mouth plate. You can use cardboard, chipboard from food packaging like this, a thin plastic, like from a margarine tub, a plastic bin. I like to use rubber gasket material that you can find in the plumbing section of hardware stores, but that's not necessary. Any old cereal box will do for this, and plus a little bit of tape to hold the two sides together. Glue is going to be needed to attach the mouth plate, and you might want it for many other things as well. I will be using a fabric hot glue because when I'm teaching video classes like this one, I need things to dry fast, so I'm using hot glue. But if you have the time to let things dry, you can use a fabric safe glue like faber tack or Fabri fix or even tacky glue. You can also hand stitch your puppet instead of using glue in many instances. I just want you to know that when you see me using hot glue, that's for my own convenience. You can substitute any fabric glue or hand stitching. Use whatever method you're comfortable with. If you're working with kids, I would suggest something like tacky glue. And then you'll need to choose how to accessorize your puppet with its eyes, its nose, its hair, maybe some clothes, or arms. We're going to get into all of those options in the lessons coming up. But the only real required materials are a sock, some mouth plate material, and fabric safe glue or needle and thread. It's really that easy. 3. Puppet Eye Options: A lot of a puppet's character comes from their face, from their eyes, their nose, their moving mouth. So let's take a little bit of time to talk about different options that you have for the eyes of your puppet. Of course, they are googly eyes. Those are the traditional sock puppet eyes. You could also cut out pieces of felt to make eyes or any kind of fabric, especially non fray fabrics like felt or fleece. These are called safety eyes, and you can purchase these in craft stores or buy them online. They basically have a stem that has a attachment that you put this on the top of the fabric, and you put this on the bottom underneath and you lock those together and so the eye won't come out, and you can get them in a lot of different types. There's just blue, yellow, brown, green, these are like frog eyes, and then even just a plain black. It's also available. So you got a lot of options with safety eyes. If they're quick and easy to use. You can also purchase different kinds of glass eyes, and these are just a glass, it's called a glass cabacon, and then it has some piece of paper vinyl on the back. Of course, you can also do a do it yourself version of this. These are different versions of resin or glass eyes that you can glue onto your puppet. You can either get the glass cabachons in different sizes that you then glue over a printed eyeball like this. You can also make your own using resin. Here, I have a silicone mold that has different circular little globe shapes on it, and I use ultra violet resin for mine, but there are other types of resin that don't require the UV light. You just layer them on. I'm not going to get into detail on how resin eyes are made. But if you're already into resin crafts, that's something that you can consider. You can also use printed eyes, whether you make these yourself like on a photoshop or you can buy sheets of these and print them out yourself. Then there's a dome type of resin that you can use to just coat over the top of it to give it a clear glaze. That's another option, and it will end up looking like these that you purchase at the craft store. Then we get into ball eyes, and I'm going to show you how to make these particular ball eyes. This is actually a ball inside. You could use ping pong balls. That's more traditional for a Muppet style of puppet. And these, I actually like to cut my ping pong ball cut a hole, and then I like to cover mine in fabric. But that's just my preference. I don't like the plastic ping pong ball look, but covered in fabric, I can then stitch it on instead of gluing it on, so that's an option. I'm going to show you how to make a smaller version of that. And then the little felt circles here. If you don't feel comfortable cutting out circles because it's really hard to do, you could try to use a die cutter, or you can even purchase little felt circles that are made to go on the bottom of furniture to keep it from scratching, and that can work too. If you're good with painting, you can look for what are called little wooden coins. You can paint those, different however good you are at painting eyes. You can do that and then glue those onto a puppet. Embroidery is also an option with puppet eye, you could either do machine embroidery or hand embroidery. There's just some examples of some embroidered eyes. Buttons are also both a traditional sock puppet eye and can be a more advanced eye depending on what you do with your buttons. You can use fabric covered buttons and then add a little pupil to it with some paint. I used a fabric slick paint on these just to make the pupils. You could add a little highlight if you want to. You could use different sizes of buttons and layer them. So like if I took a white button, and then put a blue button and then put a tiny little black button. And it's going to be hard without stitching it on to make it stay in place, but you see how you get a nice little colored eye that way. So that's another option for eyes. Then there are lots of different options with beads. You can use wooden beads like I have here. These are plastic beads. There's some glass beads if you want to do little beady eyes. And then with everything here, you can always combine them. So you could combine a button with a bead to be the pupil, or you can take a bead like this, big wooden bead, and then put a little black bead to be the pupil or something like that. You get what I'm saying. You could use a piece of felt. Then use a bead to be the pupil or the iris or something like that. Consider layering any or all of these materials together to create your own unique eyes. I know that was a lot of information just about eyes, but there are a lot of options out there, and you should play around with a few and see which ones you like. We talked about Google eyes. We talked about felt. We talked about embroidery. We talked about fabric covered balls, which you'll see in a little bit. We talked about plastic safety eyes that you can buy at the craft store, beads or buttons. We talked about printed or painted eyes, as well as resinan glass, and even some I didn't show you like bottle caps or plastic spoons can be used for puppet eyes. Play around, see what you like. 4. Puppet Nose Options: Op. Another thing you can play around with on your puppet's face is the nose. There's not quite as many options as eyes, but there are a lot of different ways that you can make a puppet nose. Let me show you some of my favorites. Stuffed fabric noses are for that classic puppet look. And these are just a circle of fabric that you stitch around and gather it up with a piece of stuffing in the middle, and you wind up with this nice little ball shaped nose that sticks off of the puppet's face. I'm going to be showing you how we make these. You can also go a little further and add some nostrils, and I've used a pencil to just shade that in. Pompoms are a classic sock puppet nose. You just glue them on there, and of course, they come in different colors and sizes and textures, and you can even make your own pompoms. Safety noses are another option, and just like the safety eyes, they have a stem and a backing that you push together to lock that in place, and they even come with little textured animal. This actually looks like like a dog or a bear or something's nose. Makeup sponges are a new favorite of mine. These are for putting on makeup, you can buy them in any cosmetic section or dollar store, something like that, and they're very squishy. They come in different shapes like this. I actually like to cut them in half so that you have a lot bigger gluing surface on the back. You can use paints on these. Here's some metallic paints that I've used. These are the smaller little mini makeup sponges, and it's very easy to just glue that onto the back on the face of your puppet. You could always use a jingle bell for a nose for a noisy puppet. You could even use fake flowers. This is actually a foam flower, but a fabric flower would work too for some kind of themed puppt. That's a nice idea. Clay is an option, but you don't want your nose to be too heavy, but air clay or foam clay is actually very lightweight, and here's one that I'm going to show you how to sculpt. And this is just some play dough air clay that you can pick up at the Dollar Store, but you can also buy foam clay, that's a better quality for like, cost play type of foam clay, but either one will work. Once you've sculpted a clay nose, you can you can cover that in fabric, too, and then sew or glue that onto your puppet. This is a bigger version with foam clay inside. That was the puppet noses that I had examples of that I could show you. We talked about how to stuff a piece of fabric with fiber fill to make a classic squishy puppet nose. We also showed some pompoms, you could use sponges, you could sculpt some air dried foam clay. You could use a safety nose from the craft store, little plastic like doggy nose. You could use a bell or a button or a flower or whatever you want. You also have the option of not putting a nose on your puppet. 5. Basic Puppet: Boom boom boom boom. Let's get started with making the most basic of sock puppets. This one is very simple with craft store materials or even dollar store materials, and I'm going to show you how to make this one. First, before we get anything more advanced, you just need a few cheap supplies and some glue to make this little guy. This is just a ankle sock. There's the heel is here, the toe is here, and there's no part of the leg. And for a lot of people do sock puppets, where the toe is what you're moving as the mouth. I'm going to show you a different way. Next, where we use the heel as the mouth, but for this one, let's just do the traditional old, stick your hand in the toe. And you push the toe in like this, and now you've got a mouth. Okay, but we're going to give it a rigid mouth plate so that it's easier to work that mouth. For the mouth plate, I've got a few different options here, and you can any kind of rigid like cardboard. This is chip board, think like cereal box, food packaging. This is a piece of gasket rubber that's nice and flexible. Even a plastic, this is from a dish pan, and I just drew a circle. This is the bottom of a dish pan. If you have a plastic tub, a margarine lid, anything like that, then plastic like this, that's easy to cut with scissors. That works too. Cardboard, like I said, foam core, if you have balsa wood that you can work with any of those things work. For these mouth plates, what we're going to do is cut your circle in half. And you can either cut it directly like straight in the middle. That's one option, or you can cut it a little off to the side and give it either an overbite or an underbite. So I'll show an example of that. You can also do it where it's more of an oval instead of a circle. But let's just do a circle to stay simple here. I'm going to cut not in the center. And then we're going to glue the two halves, not glue. Sorry. We're going to tape the two halves back together, and that creates our hinge for the mouth. I leave about a quarter inch in between the two pieces and just smack a piece of tape on there. And you can do both sides if you want. I like it. Both sides, that's less likely to come apart. And you can trim this around the edge if you want to. I find that it's not even necessary. Just press that tape down and now we have a hinged mouth. And that should hold pretty good. I'm using duct tape. You could use packaging tape or some other kind of tape, but duct tape is pretty strong. Okay. So there's a mouth plate there, I've got a cardboard mouth plate here, and we've got a couple to start with. What we're going to do is just turn our sock inside out, and we need to get this seam as much into this corner as we can when we're gluing. And make sure you get all the way to the edge, but not in the hinge. And then fill it in it a little bit. You don't want too much glue because it will seep through your fabric. I'm going to do one side first. Like I said, I really want that to be flattened out and then p like that. Press that down until it sticks. If you were using some kind of fabric glue that takes time to dry, you could always use a clothes pin or a little clamp or something to hold the mouth closed, make sure that glue sticks. Hot glue, though, it should set up pretty quickly for us. And see how I'm getting the sock kind of flat up into that hinge like that. Again, I'm gluing this to the wrong side, so I turn my sock inside out so that I could glue this flop it on there, press it down and hold it until your glue sets up. While I'm holding this down, let's talk about the size of the circle to your sock. You want the circle to be around the same width or diameter of how wide your sock is. This one's a little small. This one's a little bit closer. This one's going to be too big. That's almost okay. Little hangs over. So a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller is fine, but you don't want to have a really tiny circle. Here's my take measure. You don't want something that size. In your puppet, it's going to have a little tiny mouth. It's going to be hard to work. I would say at least 3 " for adults and children. You need this is a three inch diameter circle. You can see what I'm talking about. 3 ". Okay? Which would be? What is that? 7.5 centimeters? Or as much as 4 ", which is a 10 centimeters. Though anywhere 3-4 " is pretty good, you could make it longer. If you wanted to make it an oval, you could do that, but you don't want it to be too wide, because I mean, if you just look at the width of your hand, you don't need it to be too much bigger than that. Now, my hands are kind of small. If you had a bigger hand, maybe a little bit bigger, but again, I mean, socks aren't huge, so you don't need it to be that big. This should be dry, and we're going to flip them right side. Come on, dude. There you go. Okay. Okay. And that's our mouth plate. Get my fingers in there. And you can see how there's a couple of ways you can do this. You can either pull this corner past the corner of the circle or you can also let the fabric come in forward and give it kind of more of a smiley look. See that? Okay. That is our mouth plate. And for all the puppets that we're going to do, you use the same basic technique for the mouth plate. You could put it at the toe of the sock or back at the heel, which we're going to do on the next puppet. So we're ready to go ahead and make this an actual character. And because this is just going to be my basic sock puppet, I am going to use down and dirty Google eye. I mean, it doesn't get simpler than Googly eyes, right? And then just a little pom pom nose. And that will be our first basic sock puppet that you can put together in just a matter of minutes. It really doesn't take long. But I think I actually want to step this up a bit because I've got these giant pom poms that I haven't used in forever. I think I actually want to add these onto my puppet, onto the head like this, and then attach the eyeballs to that. And yeah, I did glue it to the table. It happens, and it's very easy to clean it up, but don't do that. That's not the intention, but it is easy to fix. Once the glue is dry, I can just snip that off of the back of the pump. Our first puppet is finished. And in this particular lesson, you learned how to make the most basic of sock puppet using Google eyes. I used some little pompoms. Actually, big pompoms, a little pompom for the nose, and just a basic sock with aboard mouth plate in this one. Anybody can make this, you probably already have these supplies at home or a quick trip to some nearby store could probably get you all of these supplies. 6. Better Puppet Head: Boom boom boom Let's try some more puppet making skills by creating a different kind of sock puppet head. The mouth plate on this next puppet is done the same as we did before, so I'll be speeding through that part. But I used a piece of gasket rubber for a more flexible mouth instead of cardboard. And we'll put the mouth at the heel of the sock instead of the toe to give it more dimension to the head. We'll also talk about stuffing the head to give it some shape. Let's get this stuff out of the way. And we'll start with gluing our mouth plate into our sock. And this time, I am not going to use the toe of the sock. I'm actually going to use the heel of the sock as my mouth plate, and then I'm going to have a little bit of head up on top of that. So we're going to do quite a bit of hand sewing with needle and thread for this one. I do recommend you use a heavy thread. This is not regular sewing thread. This is heavy duty. You can use upholstery thread or something like that. It has more strength to it. So when you pull tightly on it, it won't break as easily as regular thread. And you can just get that at any sewing store. I do recommend that, but if you don't have that, you can use regular thread. I'm going to cut this sock off at the top. And it doesn't really there's no right or wrong amount of where you do this. Just figure out how much of a head you want. You might want the whole thing. You could make it that tall if you wanted to, and then we're going to stuff that. You could make it a really big long head or you could make it something smaller. I'm going to cut it right about here. Get my hand out of there and just snip it off. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to gather the top edge. Just with some needle and thread. Now I will show you the basics of how I'm doing this, but this is the same thing we're going to do for the top of the head, the nose and the eyes is going to use just a basic gathering stitch. I like to use a double thread. I'm going to thread my needle and I've got two strands of thread on there. Tie a knot at the end. I like to do a double knot just to be sure. Just take a little stitch towards the top and don't pull it all the way to the edge. Then to lock this in, I'm going to pass my needle through the loop of thread at the end. Then when I pull that down, that's going to give, I got a tangle. That's going to give me a nice tight knot that's not going to come out. Now I'm going to work from just one side. You could just sew it up this way, and that would be fine, but it would give you a flat head. I want it to be more of a cone shaped head, so I'm going to gather it. In this gathering stitch, there is a stitch diagram in your class downloads, if you want a drawing of how this works, but I'm just running the needle in and out in and out. And after a few stitches, I pull it. Every I'd say a quarter inch to a half inch is good for this. If you make your stitches too long, then it's not going to be as tight of a closing. T. At the end, I've come back to where I started, and I want to take just a couple more stitches. Now we pull this tight, and that should pull everything together. If you have an opening, something is stuck in here. Sometimes the thread might get a little knot in it. See how that happened, and find where that knot is, and then you can get that taken care of. I want to make sure there's nothing sticking through that hole and then pull that thread tight and take a couple more stitches just to tie that make it nice and secure. This is going to be the top of our puppet's head. Still a sock puppet, still making it out of the sock. But you'll see the shape is going to be a little more interesting on this one. To tie a knot with your needle and thread, just take a stitch and hold the loop. See that loop of thread I've got. Pass your needle through the first loop, and then that's actually going to make a loop on the other side. Pass your needle through that loop. And then pull up. It's easier if you put your needle into the loop and then slowly pull and that'll just bring that surface or that not down to the surface perfect. Since this is going to be hidden on the inside, it's okay if we have some thread tails. That was our basic gathering stitch, and we're going to be doing that a couple more times to make the nose and the eyes. When we turn this guy around, you see how now I did have a little bit poking out, but that's okay. In his mouth is going to be the heel here. He's going to look like that. Now he will get bigger when we stuff it, it's going to stretch this head out. We can go ahead and put his mouth plate in Again, I'm using the heel for that. So just flatten your sock, get it as flat as you can, and even you want to have it in the center like this. Now, don't be confused, the mouthplate doesn't go like that. It actually needs to go where the hinge is on this. Curved to straight. And like we did before, we're going to try to pull that curve up into the straight part, right? I'm just going to speed through this because you saw this is exactly like the one we did before. It's just in a different place. Here he goes like that, and I'm going to get a handful of stuffing. Now, I'm just going to do this quick and dirty, and I'm going to grab a handful of stuffing and put it up in his head. If you were doing something where children were going to be using these puppets and you needed to be more careful, then you would want to actually create a pillow made of stretch fabric and put the stuffing in that and then put it in the head. You could even use an off cut from your sock or something and stuff that. Use your gathering stitch to pull that together and then put that up in the head. Whatever you want to do. But because this is just for me to demonstrate how this works. Let me show you how It looks once you stuff his head. You can use different types of things to stuff the head. It doesn't have to be fiber fill. I'm going to go ahead and cut off and make the body the size that I want because this cuff is really starting to annoy me. That should make it easier to work with. I expect I'm going to give this one a shirt so I can make his body longer in a bit. And you can either have just your thumb down here in the chin area, or sometimes I like to my pinkies down there too, your thumb and your pinky with this flexible mouth plate. So you can talk with it, and then you can also do facial expressions like this. Make him smile. B. We form the head by putting the mouth plate in the heel of our sock, and we also created a different kind of head shape by cutting off the top of the sock and stitching it closed with a gathering stitch. Then we filled the head with some fiber stuffing. You could use another type of stuffing as well. 7. Fabric Puppet Nose: We're going to add a fabric nose to our puppet in this lesson. You'll see how to turn any stretch fabric into a nose and give it the look of nostrils. And then we'll stitch it to the puppet's head. You can also play around with the size of your circle to make the nose smaller or bigger with this technique. Remember, this class includes a downloadable diagram of these hand stitches, if you need to refer to that while you're making your own puppets. There's actually a lot of hand stitching in this one, like I said. For each time, you're going to have a double strand of thread and you want it to be 12 to 18 " long. A much longer than that, it's going to be hard to deal with. About 12 to 18 " double stranded with a not at the end. Each time we're doing these gathering stitches, you'll start with this. I do like to use a long doll needle. Which is longer than a regular needle. It's just easier to stitch with. You can get more stitches on it. It can go through the puppet head further. So that's something to look for. It does make it easier. And we're just going to do the gathering stitch again. So each time that I'm doing gathering stitches, it's exactly like I showed you before, and I'm not going to make you watch every stitch. So we'll just speed through this. With the nose, we just want a little bit of fiber stuffing in there. You don't need too much. Pack that down, put it in there, and make sure that it gets below that string line. Because when we pull, we don't want stuffing sticking all out of there. We want the fabric to curl up around the stuffing. I'm pushing down with my thumb into the stuffing as I pull my thread and that gets it just like that. We can bury the thread inside the nose. It's always a good idea to bury the thread inside the stuffing. Come up to the right side and you may think, Oh, my gosh, I'm going to have a thread there, but you're not because when you cut it at the surface, it disappears into the stuffing. Just play around with this nose and you could leave it like this. This is perfectly fine. I'm going to start with another needle and thread to give him nostrils and decide which is the top, which is the bottom. Because I've got a big wrinkle down here, I'm going to make this the bottom of the nose. I'm going to run my needle from the back the top and down to a nostril. You just get to decide where that nostril is. Then about a quarter inch away, go back in again to the back. If you go to the top, it's going to squish that nose down like this, and we don't want that. I'm going to go to the back just on the other side of that knot. It's best if you go ahead and pull it, that's fine. You see how it starts making that nostril, but you want to do it two to three times to lock that stitch in place. Just repeat, go down to that nostril. Don't let your thread tangle up on you. Go back in again, quarter inch is good. Pull that. I have a thread tail that snuck in and is trying to get incorporated. We're going to make sure that doesn't happen. There's one thread tail. Okay. When I pull that second one, that should lock in place, so it's not coming like bouncing back out again. That thread tails bugging me. It's got nose hairs, apparently. When you pull on that, it should hold in place and not bounce back. You see that? I don't even have to nod it. It's just going to hold. Usually two stitches is good to hold that in place. Sometimes you'll need three, it depends on how slippery your fabric and thread are. Going to run it down through the other side, and give them a nostril on the other side and just eyeball where you want that to be. A little more here. Again, a quarter inch away back up to the back pull. And then repeat it. Just try to come as close. You don't have to get it through the exact same holes as before. That's not necessary, but try to get close in that area. That's my second stitch, and when I pull that it s hold, and it does. Now I've got my nose with nostrils. And we can just go ahead and we could not that off or we could go ahead and stitch it on while we've got this tail of thread. It's enough thread to get it on there. That's what I'm going to do. First, I have another thread sticking out from I should have cut those tails off before and I didn't. He just wants to have a hairy nose. I don't really know what to do about that. I'm going to go ahead and shade this with a colored pencil. This couldn't be any easier. I just stick my pencil up in his nose and pinch and then just twist it around like you're sharpening the pencil and you get that shading inside there. Let's stitch his nose on. Play around with the placement of the nose and decide where you want it. You could put it right down next to the top of the mouth at that lip. You could put it further up in the face. You put it anywhere you want. I would suggest keeping it in the middle of the face. Otherwise, it's just not going to look human. I don't know. That's good. I think I like it there. And we're going to ladder stitch this on. And the ladder stitch, you just take a small stitch, again, about a quarter inch each time into the sock, and then into the edge of the nose. And your thread will get caught on the top of its head. Just be patient with that. Through the sock and then through the nose and keep stitching like that all the way around till it's done. Okay, his nose is on. I'm just going to pull the thread down to the bottom where it's a little less obvious. Just stick it through there. And then tie a knot. That's how fabric puppet noses are made. You learned how to use a gathering stitch to turn a circle of stretch fabric into a nose with some fibropiil, and even create nostrils, if you want to. Then you saw how to sew the nose securely to the puppet's face. 8. Ball Eyes: Bo bo bo We're going to give our puppet bulging eyes, and this technique is very similar to how we made the nose. But for these eyes, I'll be using half of a rubber ball for each eye and covering it with a white sock, so we can securely stitch the head. Then we'll talk about the important task of placing the pupils on the eyeballs. We start out by stitching a gathering stitch around two small circles of white sock or any white stretchy fabric will work for this. And again, that was just a sock. Now I'm going to use my rubber ball. This is just a ball for playing Jacks. You can also use ping pong balls. The here's a small version of a ping pong ball that's been covered with a neoprene scuba fabric. This is typically what I would use on a larger puppet for the ping pong ball, but for the sock puppet, that's pretty big. So that's why I'm going to use this little jack ball. Also for larger puppts, easter eggs or mini aster eggs or things like that can. This is hard to cut in half. I will say I do have some really heavy duty scissors that can manage it. Otherwise, you might need ten snips or something like that, and I'm just going to position my scissors right on the seam both sides and be very careful because these scissors are super sharp and heavy duty, and I am able to get this ball cut in half. With my scissors. But it's not again, these are super sharp heavy duty scissors. Otherwise, you might need ten snips or something. Again, this is a more advanced method that we're doing here, not something that you would do with children or you wouldn't want them to have to cut that ball in half. You just put the ball in there with the dome side towards the fabric. Fabric get a little pilly. Just like that, flat side up, pull your thread and see how it gathers around, and that's going to give us a nice dome shaped eye. Usually, I do like three or four stitches across the back, and that's good enough, just tie a knot at that point. There's one eyeball. I've got the nose sewn on. I've got both of the eyes with the gathered fabric around the back, and now we're just going to play around with how we want the eyes to look and where we want to place them. I went ahead and put the pupils on. We're going to take those off when we're stitching. But just to get an idea of how they're going to look and place your eyes wherever you want, obviously, you can really change the look of a puppet by where the eyes and nose are placed. I'm like in the wide set eyes like this. But that's a different look. Yeah, I think I'm going to put them like this. And if you need to, you can always use pins just to hold them in place until you stitch them. Get an idea, and these are just temporary sticker felt pads that I'm using for pupils so I can get an idea. I will glue them in permanently and make sure they're in a better place soon. So now I'm ready to stitch the on, and I'm going to do that the same way I did the nose. I got a double strand of fabric, a thread with a knot at the end. And we're just going to stitch these on with the ladder stitch. I will give you a tip. If you're right handed, put the left eye on first and then come back and do the right eye. That way, you'll have more room. This eye is going to be in your way if you put it on first and it'll be harder to stitch around. So I'm going to remove that and start on this one. And I'm going to make my not on the back of the eyeball first. We'll just speed through this, but you'll get the idea of what's going on here. I do recommend removing the sticker from the eye because it's going to catch your thread quite a bit as you're stitching. Another thing to consider before you stitch your eyes in place is the grain of the fabric. You see how you can see the vertical lines or horizontal lines of that sock. You want your eyes to match. Just make sure that you line that up. I'll look a little bit better that way. Built As I said earlier, this is called the ladder stitch when we're attaching the nose and the eyes, and there is a diagram in your class resource downloads so that you can get a better look at how this goes in case you need a refresher. But we're just taking a small stitch on the sock side and then a small stitch on the side of the eye fabric. Okay, I've got one eye sewn on, and you saw how I did the ladder stitch all the way around, and I even went past my starting point a little bit. If you're sewing for children, if children are going to use this, I would recommend going around twice just to make sure you get a lot of stitches. And you will have maybe a little bit of zigzaggy look there, but it's not obvious at all. I mean, I'm not very good with the ladder stitch, and it turns out pretty clean just because of the way the ladder stitch works. So that's one eye. I'm going to go ahead and put the other one on, and then I'll be right back and show you how we continue with the pupils. Now that both eyes have been stitched to the head. We're ready to put the pupils on, and I'll teach you a few tricks on that too. Again, I'm using some little felt circles that have sticky on the back. These are used for furniture pads. I actually buy 100 at a time in a little bag, but you can also find them in stores. They might be black or green instead of I buy mine in black, but you could also paint them and then stick them on. And just a tip with puppets is you don't want to put the pupil in the center. Of the eyes because then you get that blank stare like deer in the headlights look on your puppet. You want it to look like the puppet is looking at you. The trick to that is you want it to be looking at a point through its nose. It needs to be more in the center and down like that. And then just eyeball it until you get it. You see how that's a much more engaging. It looks like it's more looking at the camera. This one is a little off. I do find and here's another tip for you. It's hard to eyeball this sometimes, but if you take a picture, it's more obvious. Just get out your cell phone and look at it through your cell phone and the evenness of it will be more obvious. It's easier to see on camera than it is in person just because of the angle of it. Play around with that. These, you could use the adhesive that comes on these, but that's not a permanent adhesive. Although it is sticking pretty good here, I might just try to leave it. But if you want to glue it down with fabric glue, the trick to doing that is to go ahead and leave it sticky, lift up one side, add some glue, just a tiny amount. My glue gun is not really heated up yet. Lay that back down, and then you would do the other side. And that'll get you a per more permanent washable glue in case you're making your puppet out of things that can be washed. In this case, he's got fiber fill inside, he's got cloth eyes over a rubber ball, some stuffing, and we used a rubber mouth plate. Everything in this guy so far can go through the washing machine. We haven't done anything to make him not washable. Now if you use cardboard in the mouth, not washable, things like that. So think about that when you're making a puppet if you want it to be machine washable. Now you know how to make bulging eyeballs that can be stitched to your puppet. We also went over how to place the pupils, so your puppet is more engaging and alive. You can try this technique with different balls or other shapes and different kind of stretch fabrics. Scuba neoprene is my favorite for this technique, but you can even use white socks or a T shirt. If the fabric is too thin and you can see through it, try using two layers of fabric. Don't forget there's a PDF stitch diagram in the class downloads if you need to refer to that for the hand stitching. 9. Mouth Lining & Eyelids: Boom boom. Let's embellish our puppet with some more details. In this lesson, we'll add a fabric liner to the mouth, so it contrasts with the puppet's face. You'll need a non framing fabric for this and felt or fleece are typically used. I'll be using glue on the mouth, but hands stitching is also an option. And then we'll add some eyelids over those bulging eyes to soften the puppet's look a little bit. I'm just going to use scraps of sock for those eyelids. But let's start with this mouth. This is just again a three inch circle of felt like I have a three inch plate inside the mouth, so I'm going to start with a three inch circle, but I'm not going to glue it all the way to the edge yet because we may have to trim some away. I'm going to apply the glue actually to the mouth here and here and here, not in the actual hinge area, and try to get this as centered as possible. And I need to actually I'm going to flip it. I mess that up, and I'll tell you why because I need to get the center of this circle in there. Otherwise, it's not going to be wide enough. There we go, and we'll trim this off. Before that starts sticking, let's get that glued down. This is not one of those things where you have to be super precise because we're not professional puppeteers here. We're just playing around with some puppets for fun. People probably are not going to know where your mistakes are unless you point them out. Unless you have huge globs of glue showing. That is a little more obvious. I'm going to use my small scissors to just trim away. Be careful that you don't actually cut the sock. I have put a foam noodle inside to hold things in place while I'm working on it, and you can always do something like that. Now, this is my puppet mouth plate. I see I've got a little bit of glue showing there. Try to get that covered up. One of the reasons that I personally like using black felt for the mouth because I like to cheat. If I have a mistake that I need to cover like a little bit of glue, I can always get a sharpie and just color that in. And other than the smell of the sharpie, which you can't smell. Nobody knows that I messed that up. You can just a little bit there. Glue glob, gone. I still there, but you just can't see it. It's not obvious. Then let's move on to some eyelids. I just cut off the top of a sock. The ribbing of the top of the sock is very stretchy, and that makes a nice eyelid. You can just play around with what colors you want. Oftentimes I like the nose and the eyelids to match, so that's an option. I could go light gray, like this. Could also do something that matches the puppet's skin, so a dark gray like that. The placement of the eyelids, if you put them high up, it looks like the eyes are wide open, gives them more of a frantic or angry look maybe, or you can make it further down on the eye and they look more sleepy and subdued. That's something to play with if you're going to do eyelids. I also fold this over so that I get a nice folded edge. You could though, on some socks, that cut edge is so nice and clean, that you could use that too, that would look fine. It would look perfectly fine. But let's do a folded edge on this one. It's a little harder with the folded edge because you've got a lot more bulk to deal with. The way to do this is do a little tricky way. I do want a longer one, so I need to make sure that I have enough to go all the way and wrap around that eyeball in the back. We don't want the white eyeball show in there. I'm going to figure out where I want my eyeball and I want to I'm sorry, eye lid. I want it to be from the top of this pupil here. This is just my positioning. Over on this side, I think I want it to be all the way down here. Let's probably get some pens to help us with those marks. I think all the way down to here is where I want it. I'd say line it up with the bottom of that pupil. And then the top of the pupil here is where I wanted it. And then when I glue, I can put a dot of glue in each of those spots. And I'll just glue the sides on first. Then I can trim away the excess, and then I'll go ahead and glue everything in the back. If you can watch me do that in a little bit speed it up here. D. Alright, so that was some eyelids. It's still looking like a gray version of Homer Simpson to me. That's kind of funny. That was not my intention. Speaking of intentions, sometimes we can't really control the characters that come out when we make $1 puppet. You may want it to look one way, but it's gonna somehow form its own personality. Don't be surprised you're bothered by this. Just go with it. Let the puppet tell you what it wants. Know, it sounds weird and woo woo, but every puppet maker learns this lesson the hard way. It's like the puppet is in charge, and it's just using your hands. There's probably some deep ungian psychology buried in there. But anyway, in this lesson you learned how to add a mouth, lining and eyelids. You could take these skills even further by adding a tongue to the mouth or spice up those eyes with false eyelashes or even lower eyelids or eye bags under the eyes. 10. Yarn Hair & Sock Sweater: Let's add just a bit more to our puppet with some yarn hair. You could use other things like feathers or fabric scraps too, and let's make an easy shirt for this puppet, too. So let's do a yarn wig. And I'm just going to get some cardboard. You can use longer if you want the puppet to have long hair that comes down like this, or you can just use something very short if you wanted just a little poof of hair on the top. I think I actually do want it shorter for this. I'm going to do something like this. 2 ". It's only 2 ", and I'm just going to wrap yarn around. A bunch of times until I get I don't know, until I feel like it's thick enough. People often ask, how many wraps, and it really depends on how thick your yarn is. If you have a thicker yarn, you're not going to be able to get as many wraps. If it's a really thin yarn, you'll want more. Just judge it by how thick this is. Remember there's two layers, and that's going to be your hair. This is really an eyeball type of experience. If I were telling you exactly which yarn to use and we were using a pattern, then I could tell you how many wraps. But this class is really more of a free form like use your own materials, use your own creativity, play around, and it doesn't have to be perfect. Just make something that you like. Make a bunch of the m until you fall in love with one that you've made. It's not a science here. It's an art. And then I'm so just super lazy at this. I'm just going to take an extra piece of yarn, tie it in a double knot. Hopefully it's strong enough to hold it, and it is good. Sometimes your yarn will break. Okay. Pull that off and where my knot is. I want that to be the bottom, so I'm going to cut right across the top. Boop. Whoo, eyelash yarn is messy. And the ties are too long, just short nose up. So now I've got this little mop of a hair, and I think That works better. I've got a lot of cleanup to do. Yeah, I should've thought through. Thought that through, but I always like to keep my mess ups in my class because I screw up all the time, too. I know when you're learning, you make a lot of mistakes, and that's how we learn. We learn from our mistakes more than we do our successes. So don't be afraid to screw things up. Yeah, I really am liking that. Let's go with that. And I'm not even going to get fancy here. I'm just going to glob a bunch of glue on top and whatever yarn sticks to it. That's how it's going to be. I mean, it doesn't get any simpler, right? You could stitch that on if you wanted to. I do want to make sure that the glue is covered. I'm going to make sure that I get yarn covering all of the glue. Just push it in. And never underrestimate the power of tape or a tape roller to totally clean up your fiber messes. And one last thing, let's give our puppet a sweater. I'm just going to use a sock that has a cute little print on it and cut off the ankle part. Cut off the toe part. And then that becomes the body. It's easier if I put my hand in and try to do it like this. And let that sock kind of curl up at the top, to give you a sort of a neckline. And then if you wanted to, you could stitch, but I will warn you if you stitch your sweater sock onto your puppet's neck here, it's not going to stretch around your hand very easily because the stitches are going to hold it tight. If you have a surger, you could go ahead and stitch with that. If you have elastic thread, you could use that. Just know that if you do decide to stitch your sweater onto your puppet, then the thread that you stitch with is going to keep it from, you're not going to be able to get your hand in there. So a warning. Consider yourself warned that our second puppet is finished. We made a simple yarn wig by wrapping yarn around a scrap of cardboard, and we made a simple shirt from a piece of a sock. If you have old sweaters or T shirts, you could use that on your puppet body as well. Thrift stores are a great place to find wonderful fibers for making and dressing puppets, so don't forget to look there. This puppet took less than 1 hour from start to finish, just to give you an idea of what was involved outside of all that video editing. 11. Sculpted Nose and Glass Eyes: Let's learn some advanced techniques that can be used on our puppets. I'm going to start on a third puppet for these next lessons. And this one has half a styrofoam ball in its head that was covered in a soft sock. That ball will sit on top of my hand while I work the puppet to shape the puppet's head. This puppet also has a plastic mouth plate. I won't be showing all those steps for this puppet because we did that in the last lessons, but you can go back to the lesson on the basic puppet for the mouth plate or the lesson on a better head if you need to see how to shape the head. Let's play with some air dry foam clay to create a nose and horns, and we're also going to attach some glass eyes layered over fabric circles to create a different kind of eye. I am going to be gluing on the facial features, but first, let me show you how these were made. After I let those dry, at least 24 hours, I then added a couple of coats of paint to them. I like the metallic paint, but you could use whatever paint. I've tried different ones. I've also got one of those makeup sponges that I showed in the nose section. You can see how soft and flexible that is. And you can use this is a paint that I used on these guys here. And even though it's foam clay, it's still a little bit soft and the paint is not chipping off. I've also used just plain acrylic craft paint, and this stuff does work on the softer stuff, but it's more prone to crack and chip. Still not too bad though. Then the best one for the flexible stuff is really the cost play paints that you can buy. This one is by plaid, but there are other brands, and it's flexible acrylic paint. Most acrylic paints like this are flexible. So it's not a huge difference, but if you already are into cost play and you have some of these paints, they really do work nicely on the soft foam. Now I want to stuff the head, and I'm going to start with getting that styrofoam ball up in there. I need to get it right up in the center. And then I wanted to add a little bit of cheeks. So I just got a couple of balls of fluff and push it up into those corners of the mouth. It should just hold itself in place pretty well. If you're taking this puppet on and off a lot, those might come out, but for occasional use. They hold in pretty good because the corners of I used a plastic mouth plate here. It digs in and holds that in place for you. Now I'm going to switch over and substitute my hand for a pool noodle just to keep this guy a little filled out so I can see what he looks like. That'll help me figure out how I want his facial features. Again, I'm just going to use hot glue for that. And I've got the foam nose. I do want it to hang a little over the lip, that doesn't give me a lot of gluing surface on the back. We'll see how that goes. I might need it a little further up. Don't use too much glue. You don't want it to spread out. We got to get them in the center as best as we can. Simple. If you do have any glue that seeps out, I will give you a tip. Just let it dry and then come back with your paint, and a tiny paint brush and just cover that up. For the eyes, I cut. I had an extra piece of sock, nothing fancy there, and when you stretch it, it gets curly and a little ragged, and I wanted to use that underneath these eyes. These are just glass cabcons. You could also use resin if you're into pouring resin stuff, and then it's just a printed eye on a piece of paper that we're glued with clear glue. When you have eyes like this, you're not going to be able to center the pupils as easily. You also want to make sure that if you have a high light on your printout, see that little white spec in the pupil, you want them to line up so that they're in the same spot. Otherwise it's going to look weird. A I'm going to glue my eyes onto the fabric first. I'm even going to be a little particular here and make sure that the arrows like the grain of the fabric is going to match up. They're at an angle. That's not going to be that obvious to most people. But when the fraying happens, I want it to happen in the same place. I got a white highlight there. It really should have been up higher. And then glue that onto him. Again, play around with your eyes and see where do you want them. I can go ahead and spin that highlight to be up top. You could put them really close together. You could put them further up on the face. You could put them further apart, and see how you get different looks, wherever you put them. I like them down here, especially since I know, I'm going to have a lot of here, so I'm going to keep them down low. That's how you sculpted a nose and horns with air dry clay, not hard at all. We'll add the horns after the hair goes on. You also learned about layering glass eyes over fabric circles for a different look. You could use that technique with any other eye materials as well. You can purchase glass eyes from some craft stores or online, and if you're more adventurous, you can design and make your own with glass cabs or resin. 12. Fur Hair and Horns: Boo. One of my favorite materials to work with is faux fur. I'll talk about where to find furs without spending a ton of money as I show you how to drape your puppet head with fur to create a hairstyle. You can glue or stitch the fur onto your puppet and we add his horns after the hair is done. I want the hair to be going up, so my fur direction. You can see how fur has a direction this way on this particular fur, and I want it to be pointing up. The way that I like to do fur is I just do a little edge, and you don't even have to have it straight. Let's do something a little fancier since we're playing with fur. I want my little scissors because I want to be able to cut just the backing of the fur and not the pile. This is the pile. The furry stuff is called the pile, and this is the backing. Let's do something that's just kind of a little more of a hair style. Now we can go ahead and ham it with the hot glue so we don't have rough edges showing. Rough edges, dude? I don't know. I don't know where that came from. If I do little clips in here, you're going to have a better time folding that up. And when you're turning edges under, it's good to have your handy dandy pin that you're not afraid to get glue on. We want it to come to the top here. So I don't need that extra. Again, just cutting the backing, not the fur. That's okay if it wraps around to the back a little bit, when I glue the back piece on and actually I'm going to google back piece on first, then that will cover it up and you won't see it. Fur blends very easily. It's very forgiving. Let's just do a little piece in the back and maybe put it further back. Let's see if that's going to work. Which is going to be a little bare spot. We're going to need a couple pieces, or just use this wider piece up here that'll work. These are just scraps of fur that I have leftover from another project. You can get F fur obviously at fabric stores. It can be expensive. Some of these furs run as much as 50, $55 a yard, sometimes even higher for the really luxury furs. However, you can find them for less. I've seen decent furs for as much as ten $15 a yard. And also, you don't need a quarter yard, even if it's $50, a quarter yard of that is 12 50, and that's not too bad. And then, of course, craft stores also sell small cuts of fur, fou furs. That's another option. I also like to go to thrift stores. I get some really cool looking stuff on like, fur vests, for blankets, things like that. So there's so many different ways to get fur, and I know a lot of people balk at it and go, Oh, it's too expensive, I can't afford that. But if you learn how to shop, it's really not that expensive to get good fur. And that's one way of creating puppet hair using F f. You can add a little or a lot. Different furs create vastly different looks. Create different hairstyles and play around. You also saw how those horns were added on top of the fur wig at the end, and our monster is really coming together. 13. Puppet Arms: For this, next lesson, it helps if you have a sewing or embroidery machine. But I'll talk about alternatives too. We're going to turn this sock puppet into a full fledged hand and rod puppet with arms that we can move and gesture. I'll be using an advanced arm pattern that has fingers, but this lesson also applies to the free pattern you can download from the class resources. The only difference is that free pattern doesn't have the hands. It's just the arm and legs. Otherwise, the steps to fill and attach puppet arms are the same. Check out the pattern in the class resources for more information on that. I'm going to do something that I think is really special and a little more advanced. This is where we're really starting to get into things. I'm going to give this puppet some arms that will bend, as well as some hands that are wired and can hold onto things and I'll attach them to the puppet body. This is more advanced. This is an arms pattern that I do have available, but it's not a part of the class. You could also just roll up a sock and use that as an arm. You could stitch just a tube along tube without the hand and use your sock or stretchy fabric and make arms out of that. There are so many different options, you could even use the pool, not pool noodles. Hair curlers could use those as some kind of arm, especially if you just wrapped them in fabric, that works, I'm going to use these to stuff these arms. These arms have been stitched onto something called tear away stabilizer, and when you trace the pattern onto the stabilizer, you stitch directly on your trace line, and then you can just tear that stabilizer away from the stitches. It's not tissue paper, not the same thing, but it comes away very easily. And then you can cut that out and turn it right side out. I use hemostats to make that job easier. So that's how these are done. Let's see. I do want to go ahead and if you want to know how to wire the fingers, I'm using flexible aluminum armature wire, which you can buy in the craft store. I know that Michael's has it, you can get it on Amazon, and I like to do it where I have this more than a foot. This is probably about 15 " of wire. I just use whatever hand I'm wiring. I just use that as my pattern on how to bend the wire. I bend it at each finger. Doesn't need to be perfect, but you do want to get the length. Then go up into the hand, bend it down, bend it back up. These are my two loose ends. Then for each finger and thumb, I'm going to go ahead and twist, twist each one. Don't twist all the way to the top because you want to have some there to change the length a little bit if you need to. And then just thread it in there. I'm going to speed through this because not everybody likes to do this stuff, and if you are into this, you've probably seen instructions on how to do this before. I can see I just wrapped a little bit of a piece of tape over that. And again, this is not for children. This is an advanced sock puppet that should be for an adult. This is not something that you want kids to play with because they might play too rough and that sharp wire end can poke out through the foam, and it's going to poke them. It's not a child's toy. So whenever you're using armature wire, it is not a child's to. I always feel like I need to remind people of that. And then I just put the, again, foam curler that I got at the dollar store, and I put it in there. And wherever that wire is that's how far down it's going to go. It probably won't go all the way into the hand, but if you're not doing a hand, you could just do an entire foam roller, and I would suggest that you cut it into two pieces so that you can get this flex at the arm. So if you want to add an arm rod, and that's something else you can do to use on your puppet. And I want the elbow to be right here, so I need to cut this piece off. Yeah. Put that one up in the upper arm. This is the lower arm. And then I just ladder stitch this closed like we did on same ladder stitch we've used in the other sections in this class. So that's how that arm is done. To attach them, you have options, but I do believe that stitching them on is the best way, and you don't want to have a thread running through the body because your hand is going to be up in there, so you have to stitch each one separately on the side. I'll do that very quickly. Before you stitch, if you do have hands, make sure that the thumbs are pointing up like this. Xx, tx than tx Normally, for arm rods, I would use something. You can use a very stiff wire if you have it. Hanger wire is what some people will use, but wire hangers are getting hard to find now. This is a thin dow rod from the craft store. I buy them in packs, and it is and based on my measurement, I'm going to say that is 5 millimeters thickness, which the diameter is 5 millimeters, so it's a thinner do rod. And when you use a dow rod, you want to or any arm rod, sorry. It needs to go right around the bottom of the hand or the wrist area right here. And since I've already sewn him up, I'm just going to clip a little hole. You want it to be super small because this sock will stretch. You just need to be big enough that you can get the arm rod in there. And then I'm going to glue that. Squeeze a little glue in there. And add that doll rod. Now we have an arm rod for our puppet. He's got a nice bend in the arm and he can gesture. Now you know how puppets get arms and how to fill them so your puppet's arm moves naturally and can gesture. We used a doll rod attached to the wrist so we can manipulate the arm. You can add rods to one or both arms. It's up to how skillful you are at working the puppet. One rod is generally easier than two for most people. If you want to add the arms and legs to your puppet, check out the class resources where you'll find a free PDF pattern for straight arms and legs that are easier than the one we just made. That pattern sheet will also help you locate the sewing and embroidery machine patterns for the more advanced arms and legs that have the fingers and toes. You may have noticed that he was already wearing a T shirt in that last section because I rearranged a lesson, but we're about to do the T shirt next. 14. Shirt & Fangs: Boom boom. We are almost done with this puppet, but I want to show you how to sew a quick T shirt for your sock puppet, and we'll finish him off with some teeth made of felt for a proper monster. This little puppet has a lot of character going on already, just by adding the fur, the horns, the little metallic nose, the glass eyes that have that shine to him. I really like this guy so far. But he naked. So let's give him a shirt. Yeah. I'll include this pattern in your class resources. It's just a very easy shirt with stretch fabric. You do need stretch fabric because whenever you're going to put this on your hand, you need to be able to stretch and move. If you don't use stretch fabric, and it needs to be really stretchy, you're going to have a hard time getting this onto your puppet and moving your hand around. It does need to be something stretchy, an old T shirt works great or a sock or something like that. And it's just a seam up the side and the arm here. It's that simple. And then you just cut a hole for the neck. I don't bother finishing up the neck or the hem or anything like that. I just It's a sock puppet. You know, and it's non fray stretchy fabric. So I just don't go to great lengths to do that. If that's your style, then, by all means, take that time to do that. But it's not my style. Even the clothes that I wear, I like unfinished edges. I just like things unfinished. I don't know. It bodes well that I like making sock puppets because they're just not that complicated. Even this guy with his fancy little hands and his fancy little clay horns. He's not that complicated, you know? It's not like a professional puppet that is made with a bunch of foam and a bunch of different mechanical parts. Puppets can get very complicated, but not these guys. That's what I like about them. You can whip one up in a day easily. You can whip up several of them in a day. I think he needs one more thing. I think he needs a little bit of chest hair. Maybe coming out of his shirt, maybe coming out of his sleeves, something to bring this white fur down into the body and complete the look. And also going to be honest here. Putting some fur here, it's going to cover up the fact that my thumb is showing when I work the puppet's mouth. Yeah. For this, we want just the tiniest little snippet of fur. Less than that. Maybe half of that. And as before, we're just cutting the backing, not the actual fur cause we don't want to shorten our fur. Okay. Where's our tape roller 'cause he's definitely gonna need it. One thing I will say about a puppet with a serious overbite like this one. Really works better when you have teeth or fangs or something like that. Felt is what's usually used for sock puppet for teeth or anything, and this is the cheap craft store felt. So it is s through, which is part of the problem, but I'm going to try something and see if we can get it a little more sturdy. First of all, I need to clean it off because it's got fur everywhere. And what I want to try. This is an experiment. So bear with me, and let's see if this works. Yeah, that's enough. I'm going to try to get a very thin layer of glue and actually hot glue is not going to be the best for this particular application, but I'm going to try it and see what happens. Try to get that as thin as I can. Fabric glue would actually work better here. Fold it over, and it's going to give me two layers is what I'm going for, and that it. First of all, it's going to stiffen the felt. It's not going to be all floppy. You don't want your teeth like flopping around. It's going to stiffen the felt and it's also going to make it more opaque. So you can't see through it anymore. Then we can cut our little teeth. I think if I can get it so that they're flatter on the side like how this opens up, that's going to give me better gluing surface. I'm going to cut it this way. And there's not glue on the edge, so I don't want that. How about this? How big do we want it? Maybe half of that? Yeah, that'll work. Let me get another one like that, and again, I want it at the top edge like that. I just going to use the first one as a pattern for the second one. I said teeth, but really, I meant things. That one's a little too long. A little long in the tooth. Again, there are many ways to make teeth. This is not the only way. This is just the one that I'm making up right now because I don't typically use teeth. One of these sides was not glued very well. Definitely don't want too much glue for this. Put that right there on the edge. I get them even. I'm putting the teeth right on the edge of the mouth plate right here, right on the outside of it. Our third puppet is finished. In this last lesson on advanced sock puppets, you learned about making an easy T shirt out of a stretchy fabric. You could also use T shirt, an old T shirt or sock for that for the stretchy fabric, and we gave our monster fangs made of felt. I like how this little guy turned out, and he's my favorite so far. In case you're wondering, this puppet was put together in under 2 hours, not including the drying time for the clay, the paint, and the glue. So even though he's more advanced, it's still something you can finish in less than a day. 15. Gallery & Outro: That's it for our sock puppet class. I hope you had a good time. I hope you got lots of ideas, and I really hope that you try to make your own sock puppet as beginner or as advanced as you want to get, I've given you plenty of ideas and skills to play around with, different techniques that you can try. Make several and see how you like to make them. Everybody has different tastes in their puppets. One of the best things about making puppets is seeing how other people make puppets to get different ideas and get inspired and see how different materials are used by other people. I'm going to show you some that I have back here that are in progress or finished or somewhere in between. I don't know, just to give you some different ideas on materials, skills, techniques, things like that, that we've been talking about through the whole class. I'll show you some examples. First example you've already seen this one. This was just our basic sock puppet with the cardboard mouth, pompoms Google Eze. Nothing too complicated there, and that one was all glued together. Our second puppet, I'm still actually working on this because I might go ahead and add some arms, and I've also got some legs here. These were done on the embroider machine. I'll also have a sewing pattern available for these in my shop. And they have toenails, but this furry fabric you can't see it. And I'm playing around with adding arms and legs, but this was the one that had the fabric covered balls. These were rubber balls. You could use ping pong balls, whatever, and a fabric nose that we added nostrils to a little furry yarn for hair, the mouth plate. So nothing complicated here other than a lot of hand stitching that we did. And then, of course, sample number three is the one where we did the sculpting with the foam air dry clay. We did some glass eyes, fabric underneath, teeth, mouth plate. So of course, fur, you don't need to have the whole body made of fur. You can just have fur peeking out. We just glued pieces on, and then we have his shirt that covers it up. So consider different kinds of clothes to T shirts. Of course, if you have an embroidery machine, you could embroider something on the shirt. I'll be doing that again soon. And arms with or without wire with or without an arm rod. You've got tons of options with arms, legs, shirts, things like that. A different version of arms and legs would be this guy here. I'm trying to decide if I want to put a nose on him or not, but I think that he looks better without the nose in this case. I will be gluing some black fur on for his hair. It's not attached yet. These are just little plastic beads, and you can't see the bead holes because they're hidden on the sides. This is fur yarn that is just glued around the eyes to make them really pop. Add in, I don't know, it looks like a mask. And then I just used some paint for the pupils. This is all that is, a tiny paint brush and a little pupil. And then these are some basic arms. These are another pattern that I have that are just basically tubes, and then I've put the curlers inside. This one's not finished, so you can see, I take the wire out of those foam curlers that you get from the dollar store and then put those in there. And then that way it can move. There's arms and also legs. They're exactly the same. The arms and legs are the same. These curlers still have the wire in them, so I can pose them if I want. You can use them without wire to make them move or with wire to make them hold the pose, different options. This is actually in case you're wondering, I use jars, and this is a glass candle just to hold the puppets and while I work on them or display them. All right, this is just a basic sweat sock. This is as easy as it can a white sock. He's got a pink lining in his mouth, and then just some fur glued on to his chin for a beard. See how that's attached and a little bit of fur on top for his hair to fly around. The particular face on this one, this was done with machine embroidery. You could also do hand embroidery, and it's just the eyes, some little eyebrows, and then there's a stitched line that goes around here. What I do is I put stuffing between the stabilizer. Whenever you're doing machine embroidery, you have to have a stabilizer. Between the stabilizer and the sock is some stuffing and that makes the nose pop out and gives it dimension like that. For the bunny Monster thing, I'm not even sure what to call this, but this was just a gray sock. And I did with the heel is the mouth plate, like we've done in two of our puppets today, and the ears are the top of the sock. This particular sock had the heel here, and it went all the way to the toe. This was a men's large sock. I'm pretty sure. I did turn it inside out. It's smoother on this side and it's more fuzzy on the inside of the sock, so I turned it inside out to get a more fuzzy look. These were just hand stitched or you could stitch them on a sewing machine, doesn't matter. A little bit of glued fur. For the eyes, I did use plastic safety eyes for this, but they're not actually attached from the back with the backing of the safety eye. Because inside of here, I used half of a foam kids football, a toy football in here. If you can see that dome shape, that's the football that's up inside the head. And I just poked holes into the foam and the sock and then put some glue on the stem of the eye and stuck it in there and that'll hold it in place. These little stripy things around the eyes. These are ponytail holders that I found at the Dollar store, and I loved the pattern of the stripes. And so I just cut them and made this like tear drop shape. I did add a little bit of paint in the corners of the eye so that the gray wouldn't show through. The nose is very similar to one that we've already done with a couple of nostrils. The mouth has a little uvula, mouth plate as well as a little slice of makeup sponge that's been painted for the tongue. It has dimension and sticks up like a tongue would. I think that's everything on this one. I told you everything I've done here. This guys still. He's maybe one of my favorites so far. This one's different than the others. This one does use the toe as the mouth plate, but instead of putting your hand in it, it actually has a hole in the back where I've glued the jaws of a clothes pin, not a safety pin, a clothes pin to his mouth plate. So he talks like this. You squeeze the clothes pin in the back to make the mouth move. Then I've just put him in a little box for now. I'm looking for some kind of special container. He does have arms, and they can move. I may add a arm rod to him, and he's got another makeup sponge painted with metallic paint, a little bit of fur. Again, this is fur for his eyebrows as well, Fur for his mustache, and these are embroidered eyes. You could use any kind of eye for that. I think he'd look good with some glass button eyes, too. This one also has just some little spots of hot glue on the front for a little fangy teeth on the bottom jaw, but I like this guy. Okay. Don't box me in. If you want to know more about making puppets or stop motion puppets or dolls or plushies. Check me out at ballyhoo creations.com. I'm on YouTube, as well as I have a website, and you can get some patterns, and for both Borden machines and sewing machines, I do both. So if you're looking for patterns to make your own puppets, go check that out too. Hey, if you're still here, please consider leaving a class review to let others know that you like this class so much, you watched it all the way to the end. Your review really helps me out when developing classes like this. So thanks in advance for the review. And My