When you know how to make hand puppets, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for bringing your children’s creativity to life. You can make your own version of their favorite fictional characters, or help them design their own creations to act out stories from their imaginations. Their personas and plots can get as complex as a child’s infinite ingenuity can devise, but the ability to bring their vision to life rests on a few simple principles for making hand puppets.

Here are a few basic hand puppet projects for children to help introduce them to the possibilities of puppeteering. These projects teach how to make hand puppets from three everyday objects: a sock, a bag, and a handkerchief.

Puppet Materials

Before we get into our three projects, it will help put things in perspective to say a brief word about puppet materials. Puppet materials can be divided into four main categories:

• Materials for covering the hand, such as socks, gloves, handkerchiefs, and bags
• Decorative materials for creating body parts and clothes to add to the puppet, usually made from felt, paper, plastic, and for hair, yarn or string or wool
• Materials for attaching decorations to the puppet, such as string, rubber bands, glue, and stitching
• Coloring materials, such as washable markers and paint

The projects below introduce how to use some of the materials used for covering the hand when creating puppets. When decorating and coloring puppets, any of the materials mentioned above may be substituted for the suggestions given below, vastly expanding the range of what you can do with these examples.

Talking Sock

With this range of versatility in mind, let’s start with how to create a hand puppet from a sock, one of the easiest materials to use.

1. Obtain an old sock or a sock you do not need. This will be the puppet’s body.
2. Insert your hand into the sock to get an idea where the different facial features should go. Use a means such as a pen or tape to mark where the eyes, nose, and mouth belong.
3. Start the face by adding eyes. You can make buy plastic eyes; make eyes from buttons, felt, or paper; or draw them on with marker or paint them.
4. Add a nose, using materials like you used for eyes.
5. Add a mouth where you marked the mouth should go. If you are drawing the mouth on you can hold your hand inside the sock while you color the indicated area.
6. Add hair and eyebrows. You can use yarn, wool, string, or strips of paper.
7. Add any clothes or accessories like glasses.
8. Insert your hand to bring your puppet to life, and move your thumb up and down to make its mouth move.

Talking Bag

A variation on a sock puppet is a puppet made from a brown paper lunch bag or similar bag:

1. Flatten the bag, or leave it flat if it is already flat. The fold where the bottom of the bag flops over forms the line between the upper part of the puppet’s face, where you will put your fingers, and the puppet’s mouth, where you will put your thumb.
2. Decorate the puppet’s face and mouth. With a paper bag you will probably find it easiest to draw on the bag, but you can use other decorating materials.
3. Insert your hand into the bag, with your fingers above the fold and your thumb below.

Funny Little Bunny Handkerchief

Another type of hand puppet can be made from a handkerchief. Here you fold the handkerchief to mold it into a shape resembling a face. In this example we’ll make a bunny:

1. Choose a large handkerchief that will be big enough to still cover your hand after it has been folded.
2. Drape the handkerchief over your fist so that your hand is in the middle of the cloth, equally covered on all sides.
3. Grab the front corner of the handkerchief hanging nearest your thumb and lift it up through a groove in the fabric held between your second and third fingers. This will form the bunny’s first ear.
4. Lift the other front corner hanging nearest your pinky through your third and fourth fingers to make the bunny’s second ear.
5. The two back corners will now be dangling. Tie them together behind your wrist.
6. Wriggle your middle finger to make your bunny wiggle its nose.

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