Darcy

I made Darcy while waiting for the glue to dry on a couple other puppets I was making for a show at the time. She's just a quick little project, but I love her goofy expression!

I wanted to style her off of a poison dart frog, with bright and cheery colors. I also wanted her to be small since I have a project planned in the future that will need a puppet of about her size. All the fabric and materials were scavanged from my collection.

Here's a couple images I used for inspiration:

I started off by sculpting her head out of clay.

Her hands were next. I wanted her to have spindly thin frog hands, and hopefully be able to hold things. I looked up tutorials on making fabric buttons, and used it to make the balls at the ends of her fingers. The rest of the hands were sculpted out of wire, and I sewed the balls to the end of each finger before wrapping the whole thing in a matching embroidery thread.

Her outfit is made of two baggy rectangles, with half-circles cut out of each corner as well as the center for the neck. I gathered the edges of the holes and wrapped the thread tightly around the wrists to secure them. To hide the seam, she got some cute little ruffled cuffs made out of ribbon.

I wanted her head to be able to seperate from her neck on a wire, so only her neck would be attached to the fabric of her clothes and the wire there would form a hole to allow the second wire through. I gathered the edge of the hole in the fabric again, and pulled it through and around the wire loop where I sewed it down. She also got a cute ruffled collar to hide the seam.

After that, all that was left was finishing up the head and giving her a little hat!

The wires controlling the arms bend into loops at the bottom, which fit over the puppeteer's thumb and pointer finger to give them individual movement. The neck wire is also bent into a loop to close around a finger of the other hand, and the head wire is simply held (though it's bent into shape at the bottom to make it easier to hold/turn).

She's so small and doesn't have a proper base or way to hang her up, so for storage I thought I'd make her a little house! Her house is a cone of vinyl, themed after a pitcher plant which some frogs are known to live in and eat the insects that fly inside.

The vinyl is hand-sewn together, and I put a piece of wire that wraps around the lip of the pitcher to keep it open and extends into the leaf on top to hold it upright. The edge of the leaf is lined with a ruffled yellow ribbon sewn into the seam.

I needed to cover up the base, so I covered it with leaves. These leaves are made out of masking tape sandwiching a wire frame, which allows them to be easily pose-able. It's the same technique I used for the leaves on my Audrey II puppet