7 Different Ways to Make Fun DIY Puppets for Kids

Puppets have been my favorite game for years. I remember very well all the characters that my mother had sewn for me and how I set up the theater: two chairs facing each other at a distance of one meter, the broom resting on top of the backrests and a tablecloth hanging from the broomstick.
I was kneeling behind the tablecloth with my arms up to move the puppets and my sister in front to enjoy the show. How nice to have fun with so little!
If you have small children and want to entertain them with simple but engaging games, I really recommend creating puppets. Children will love it, believe me!
Ask the children to help you create the puppets and the theater and involve them in inventing the stories to represent. They can in fact be not only spectators – like my sister – but also puppeteers behind the scenes – as I was.

Building puppets is very easy: you can use poor materials that are easily available at home and you don’t necessarily have to know how to sew. With a little glue and the right materials you will do very well. Don’t believe us? Take a look at these DIY puppets for kids.

Puppets with socks

Rich socks and fantasy. Three simple ingredients to make cute puppets that will be born from the union of materials that we commonly find at home. Old socks, scraps of fabric, wool threads, buttons, nectars and a little glue will give life to funny snakes, duck faces, cute monsters or unlikely farmyard animals with which you can play and make your children laugh. Sew if you know how to sew, glue if you don’t know how to sew.

Puppets with recycled material

By recycling the  sleeves of sweaters that are no longer worn or using Old wool socks, puppets can be built to represent fairy tales.
To make the characters, just cut out sleeves or socks in the right colors, make two holes for the fingers about thirty centimeters from the edge and glue a cardboard template inside the top that represents the face of the desired character. The puppets you see in the picture, for example, are the characters from Little Red Riding Hood. Tutorials → puppets with recycled material

Felt puppets

If you know how to sew you can create many soft felt puppets or diapers. Puppets can be as big as a hand or even as small as covering only one finger. To make them you have to cut out the felt according to shapes that you can draw yourself or find on the web and sew them together with needle and thread and gluing the smaller parts.

Puppets with gloves

If you like finger puppets but don’t know how to sew, here’s the solution!
Cut out some characters from a magazine or printed matter and glue them on colored cards and stick Velcro behind them. Then take a pair of old gloves that you no longer use, cut off the fingers and stick the puppets on them. Easy isn’t it? 

Puppets with wooden spoons

Would you have ever imagined having puppets in the kitchen drawer? No? And yet there are! With the help of glue and markers and covering them with pieces of fabric, colored ribbons and small buttons, your
can become many cute wooden puppets. You can create endless characters and invent stories or represent your children’s favorite fairy tales. Tutorial→

Paper puppets

This is how anonymous paper bags of bread can take the form of a wagging dog, a sly cat or a toothy beaver. By cutting out shapes of eyes, mouths, noses and paws on colored cardboard and gluing them to the paper bags with a little glue, you will be able to create any nice little animal that is dictated by your imagination or asked by your children. Then one hand inside the bag and you’re done! 

Finger puppets

Another nice way to make Paper Puppets is this: cut out animal shapes and instead of legs make two holes where the children can insert their fingers. They will have fun not only drawing and coloring their favorite animals, but once done, also making them walk and run on the kitchen table and not just behind a little theatre.