How to Make Walking Turkey Finger Puppets

Last Saturday night I noticed that the NE Minneapolis Turkeys -- a flock of wild, dinosaur-like creatures that don't seem to care that they've inhabited an urban environment -- had paid a visit to our backyard.

turkey tracks: my hat for size reference

(and yes, this picture was taken mid-April in Minnesota)

Concurrent to this was my brainstorming over finger puppet ideas.  I'll be a vendor at Johnstock again this year, and I wanted to offer some kind of smaller item to sell for $5 or so.  With those footprints, puppet inspiration struck!  It was almost too obvious, since the folks behind Johnstock itself have incorporated the famous fowl into their 2013 poster:

I spent an inordinate amount of brainpower on Sunday designing a turkey finger puppet pattern.  Of course, there's easy ways to do it, but I wanted these puppets to look slightly better than what might be found in my son's take-home school folder.  I also wanted the puppets to be able to "walk," since that's what the Northeast Minneapolis turkeys do in Northeast Minneapolis.

So, here's the fruits of my labors!  I'll make as many of these as I can, and have them available for purchase at Johnstock on June 1st.  In case you can't make it, or you'd rather just make a turkey or two yourself, here's the patterns and instructions.

You'll need:
felt -- red, yellow, and three different shades of tan or brown (or whatever color you want)
googly eyes -- I used 8mm, but anything 7-12mm will probably be fine
stuffing -- poly fill, cotton, small beans, whatever works
Tacky glue
hot glue (recommended but not absolutely necessary)
and your sewing arsenal of scissors, thread, needles, etc.

The following two images are the patterns.  I designed them on 8.5 x 11" templates, so you should be able to just print them out:

The first thing to do is to sew the two body pieces together.  There's no need to "turn" the pieces, so have the best sides facing out.  Make sure to leave about an inch open on both of the legs.

Now stuff the turkey.  Alternate between putting a little into each leg until it's evenly stuffed.  You don't need it to be bursting at the seams, because then it won't "walk" -- a nice, even fill that keeps the turkey from drooping over is all you need.

Next, decide which side looks worse, and that'll be the back of the turkey.  Line up the pocket onto the turkey's legs, and sew it on, leaving the entire top of the pocket (the long, straight line) open.  Keep in mind that you're now sewing the bottom of the legs closed, so a few extra tight stitches along there will help prevent the stuffing falling out.

The body's sewn!  Now you'll work on the face.  Make sure to flip the turkey over, so that you're putting the face onto the front (non-pocket) side.  With Tacky glue, glue the red waddle on there, and then glue on the yellow beak, slightly overlapping the waddle if you can.  Glue two eyes (or one or three, depending on how eccentric your turkey is) where the eyes go.  Plug in your hot glue gun right about now.

Put down the turkey and get those big circles you cut out of complementing shades of felt.  With Tacky glue, glue the smaller of the two onto the center of the bigger one.

Get the turkey and flip it over so that you're looking at the back (pocket) side.  As neatly as you can, put a line of hot glue along the back, from a little above the pocket to the middle of the turkey's head.  Center the big circles on there -- making sure the smaller circle is facing out to the front -- and smush it onto the glue.  Unplug your hot glue gun.

Put your fingers into the pocket and take your turkey for a test drive, because this turkey is done.

If you've made a walking turkey finger puppet, be sure to let me know!  If you send pictures and permission to use them, I'll add them to this post.

(C)opyright 2013 Peter Krueger.  (Just be cool, folks -- you can make these puppets at home or with kids at school or church, you can link to this post from your own blog or site, but I'd rather not see these instructions for sale in a crafting book/website without my participation in its publication.)

Movie Review: A Family Circus Easter

With the Easter holiday nigh upon us this March, I thought I'd take a look at 1982's A Family Circus Easter, a TV special that my brothers and I watched about a kajillion times when we were kids, and that I've now introduced to my son via YouTube (currently available in two parts, here and here).  The only reason we're not watching it on VHS is that our VCR makes everything sound like it's underwater.  I still have the old tape with which my dad recorded the special off of broadcast TV:

videotape with [A Family] Circus [Easter], in my dad's handwriting

A Family Circus Easter features the entire Family Circus gang, leaping from newsprint to animated TV screen: Mommy, Daddy, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, PJ...

!!!!!!!!

Could you possibly guess who it is??  No, it's not Mama Cass, Batman, or even a Harlem Globetrotter.  The  short answer is kind of a let-down: (SPOILER) it's the Easter Bunny.

The more involved answer is actually pretty surprising: the Easter Bunny is voiced by none other than Dizzy Gillespie.  This obscure fact gives some major cultural cred to this otherwise fairly shoddy TV special.

The Easter Bunny dominates the last few minutes of the show, transporting the children to an imagination-fueled Easterland and singing a ridiculously catchy circus/jazz (jircus? jircus-core?) song about the merits of discovering the answers to your questions for yourself.  This song will unrelentingly stain your mind like Easter egg dye and melted chocolate for hours after hearing it.

Up until viewing it for the first time in decades this past week, this was really the only part of the show that I remembered, so it must have been my favorite part as a kid.  But as an adult, there's a scene -- buried deep in the slow, mundane part of the plot -- that struck me a lot harder.  I'll have to back up a little bit to explain what happens.

First of all: yeah, AFCE is strange (in awkward, not interesting, ways), and not extremely well done.  The voice casting is noticeably odd.  Mommy's voice comes off as stiff and professional, and never attains a maternal warmth.  Daddy and Jeffy are fine but unremarkable.  Billy, though -- for some reason they cast a kid with a really strong Brooklyn or Boston accent.  (I can't tell for sure, my ears and lips being more attuned to the vowel-stretching cadences of Minnesooooooooota.)

Nothing against the accent -- it's just strange that none of the other family members has it.  I guess Billy spends most of the year at an East Coast boarding school.

No, the real turd in the voice pool is Dolly, who bursts into a nausea-triggering musical number not once, not thrice, but twice.  I involuntarily wince every time she lands on one of her clumsy rhymes, sung with the annoying gusto of a professional musical theater ass.  If that girl on Glee's hero is Barbra Streisand, Dolly's hero is Ethel Merman.  

Why don't you make it simple -- forget about surPRISE

Why aren't your hiding places right before our EYES

Why not in our pockets?  Why not in our SHOES?

We think we could solve the mystery if we had some other CLUES.

And, just to rub the vinegar into your ear canals, the incidental music playing in the background of most of the show weaves her melody into endless permutations, assuring you of no relief from the memory of her child actor nastiness.  

Alright, so Billy, Dolly, and Jeffy are wondering why the Easter Bunny has to be so tricksy about hiding Easter eggs.  Mommy's Zen-like non-answer establishes an undercurrent of the show: "No one has ever asked that question before."  The kids deftly avoid the ramifications of Mommy's koan by waking up before sunrise to hide the eggs themselves, out in the open, where tot PJ will successfully find them.

They then set about capturing the Easter Bunny, so that he won't re-hide the eggs in difficult places.  They actually do capture a random rabbit, who eventually makes his way into the house, and then chases their dog Barfy (yes, Barfy) throughout the yard.  This bit is by far my son's favorite part of the show.

The only problem with the kids' scheme is that there's no greater power in the universe than a toddler's power of obliviousness.  Even when Jeffy doesn't steal the eggs from right under PJ's nose, PJ utterly fails at obtaining even a single egg.

Something interesting happens here.  It gets to the heart of the theme of the show -- that it's better to confront and pursue the answers to mysterious things yourself than to simply be given an easy, pat answer -- and it also rings true with "kid-ness," in a surprisingly nuanced way.  Even the Circus' comic strip neighbor, the laudedly "real" mopey kid Charlie Brown, rarely hits these notes so correctly.

When the three older kids see PJ weeping over his empty basket, they rally 'round and fill his basket with their own findings.  

You really expect this to be the happy ending to the conflict.  In any other cartoon -- even a Peanuts special -- it'd be obvious that PJ would suddenly beam with joy and hug his siblings in gratitude.  But that's not what happens.  PJ does the thing that his unexpectedly illogical toddler-logic compels him to do:

I, for one, was pretty surprised.  Like I said, the scene rang true with genuine "kid-ness" in a way that the rest of the show didn't prepare me for.  What's also interesting is that -- following the theme of "no easy answers to difficult questions" -- PJ's sad tantrum doesn't immediately get resolved.  The three older kids are left hanging on to loose threads of good intentions and disappointing results.

And even though the plot eventually gets resolved by the end of the show, you're still left with the nagging oppositions that AFCE calls into play: mysteries and explanations, belief and logic, the difference between the fantastical Easter Bunny and a real backyard rabbit, the easy way and the road less traveled.  You have to wonder: like Thomas insisting on touching Jesus' wounds for himself, is A Family Circus Easter asking us to question our own "easy answers" about Easter, our beliefs, and our own path through life?  

Who knows?

Daniel Tiger Trolley Fabric for Pajamas

"Where to purchase Daniel Tiger trolley fabric," you users-of-Google ask?  Well, as of today, you can order this red trolley on blue background fabric at my Spoonflower shop!  

I assume that many of you would like to make Daniel Tiger pajamas, much like he wears on Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.  I've made a fabric design that closely resembles the print on his pajamas, without being an exact copy.  Until The Fred Rogers Company decides to license its own line of Daniel Tiger pajamas, I'm pretty sure this is as close to what you're looking for as you'll ever find.

8x8 swatch sample from www.spoonflower.com/fabric/1853605

Needless to say, if you've ordered the fabric and made pajamas (or anything else) out of it, please feel free to contact me!  I'll gladly add pictures of your projects to this post.

And finally, for those who may have missed it, be sure to check out my tutorial on how to make a Mister Rogers cardigan for a Daniel Tiger fan.

Vintage "Puppet": Handmade Elf on the Shelf

Here's one of our recent thrift store finds: a vintage, handmade elf-on-the-shelf.  Button eyes, hand-stitched facial features, corduroy pants, and stiff rayon ears make this elf too precious to resist its $4.99 price.

Who made this elf?  When?  How did it end up at a thrift store?  Surely this elf has a story to tell, but that impish grin ain't talkin'.  The whole "elf-on-the-shelf" mythology hasn't really been a fixture in our house; I think between gingerbread houses on Thanksgiving night, celebrating Saint Nick's Day (December 6th), watching basically every Christmas special ever made, and just generally being Buddy the Elf bananas all the way through December leaves little room for the EOTS.  But this elf -- with his gingham and corduroy -- is more "Happy Holidays" than "Merry Christmas."  I think he can hang out all through the year, don't you?

DJAK's "On the Radio" Featuring Peter's Puppets

This is a big deal, you guys.

I sent three of my puppets to Charlie Mars in France, who had plans to feature them in a music video.

The video's done.

And it's really, really good.

So watch it now!

I would have loved the video anyway, but it turns out that DJAK is awesome!  I would recommend checking them out.  This is the link to their Facebook page, and they have a few recordings up on Spotify, too.

Makin' a Puppet: Obama Bear

If you 'Like' me on Facebook (which you should!), you've already seen this "Makin' a Puppet" series as it unfolded in real-time this weekend.  For those who might stumble upon this blog from a Google search or whatever, I've summarized the whole thing here for posterity.  My sister-in-law got me this awesome Obama fabric, so I thought I'd make an Obama bear hand puppet -- or at least a hand puppet wearing an Obama shirt.

Step 1: Cut out the pieces.

Step 2: Sew the ears, sew them to either side of the head, and sew the head.

Step 3: Sew the hands to the arms, sew the arms, and STUFF THEM.

Step 4: Sew the arms to the front of the shirt.

Step 5: Sew the back of the shirt to the front of the shirt

(creating the patented "Peter's Puppets Puppet Pita")

Step 6a: Stuff the head from Step 2 into the other end of the Pita, and sew all around the neck. 

Step 6b: Unfurl the Pita and it's starting to look like a puppet!

Step 7: Install the "cranial accessories."

Step 8: Glue in the mouthpiece and you're done!

Step 9: List the puppet for sale on Etsy.

Clearly this is a broad overview of how I make puppets, but it's enough to show you how it's done.  My process has evolved in the couple years I've been making these, but there's still two basic influences that survive:

1) The "Blue Boy" Pattern that had been floating around the Internet years ago, and has been (at least as of this writing) archived here.  It's very simple, and gives you a great place to start making puppets.  There's also a scan online of an old article in Good Housekeeping or something, which ostensibly shows a basic Muppet pattern from the Jim Henson archives.  It looks like a Muppet/Henson artifact.  But it also looks horribly complicated for something that should be pretty simple.

2) The style of sewing puppet bodies given in Peter Fraser's book Punch and Judy.  This is a great book overall, and (if it hasn't been weeded) seems to be a pretty popular resident in libraries' puppet book collections.  But don't take my word for it!

...So, there you go.  I got a pretty good response from this on Facebook, so I'll plan on doing a few more of these "making a puppet in real-time" photo series.  Follow my Facebook page to stay tuned!