Make your own easy pop-up puppet with readily available materials.
Do you remember those old cone pop-up puppets? I used to love them as a child and just knew that my daughter would love them too. Puppets are wonderful for the imagination and for pretend play. These pop-up puppets are fun, interactive, easy to make and you should have most of the materials readily available.
What you will need:
A paper cup
A skewer or thin dowel
Thin material
Yarn
Markers
Directions:
Use the end of a skewer, pencil or screwdriver to poke a hole in the center of the bottom of a paper cup. Paint the cup using acrylic paint. Paint it a solid color or paint fun designs.
Measure around the top of your paper cup. Ours was 7″ around. Measure your material. We used an old shirt for our material. Cut a piece of material in that width. Choose the length that you would like. Turn your material outer side up and run a bead of hot glue along the outer edge and fold in half.
Gluing the edges together will form a cuff. Turn the cuff inside out.
Squeeze hot glue along the upper inside edge of the paper cup. Open up the cuff with your fingers and press the outer edge of one of the ends of the cuff around the glue. Fill in any loose spots with glue and be generous with the glue to make sure that the material is secure.
Push a dowel or skewer through the hole in the cup and push up to meet the top of the material.
If using a skewer, cut the sharp edge off to avoid injury.
Gather the material around the dowel and use the glue gun to glue it in place.
Cut two identical circles out of a foam sheet. The circles should be smaller than the top of the cup. Glue and join the two circles together around the top of the dowel and material.
Draw a face onto one of the foam circles. Glue on strands of yarn to form hair.
Cut two simple hand shapes out of the foam sheet. Glue and fold each hand into a narrow piece of material to form the arms.
Glue the arms to the front of the puppet.
Pull your puppet down into the cup and pop it back up again. Wiggle it back and forth and watch it dance. My daughter loved her new puppet. She drew a background and put on a great show for us.
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