Felt Star Wars Finger Puppets -- Darth Vader

On a recent trip to the library my son ran around collecting books.  One of the books he came up with was "The Star Wars Craft Book" by Bonnie Burton.  Perfect!  He loves Star Wars and I love crafting (I like Star Wars, too, I'm just not super intensely crazy about it like he is).

There are lots of fun craft projects and directions in it.  Just take a look at some of these:

Finger puppets

Ha ha, it's giant body pillow!

Wouldn't this make an awesome Christmas present?

It's a bird house.. hehehe

How cute is this?!

One project we chose to do together is making finger puppets with felt. (Thankfully I had all the materials in my stash!)

We gathered our supplies (ignore the large embroidery thread, I just ended up using regular sewing thread) and got started.

First I traced the basic finger puppet body template from the book. Then I used that as the basis for drawing the helmet and cape (there wasn't a template for those).

After cutting out the templates I outlined them on black felt using a white marking pencil (found in the notions departments of a fabric store), and cut out the pieces. You will need two body pieces, two helmet pieces and one cape.

I bent a pipe cleaner to fit the arms (slightly shorter) and hot glued it in place.

Then I sewed up the edges, leaving the bottom open.

I put just a little bit of stuffing inside the head and the cape was sewn on just at the shoulders.

I glued the helmet pieces in place and sewed around the outer edges, again leaving the bottom open. Then I cut out tiny pieces of felt for his front "control panel" (haha, I don't know what to call it!), the mouth piece of his helmet, his eyes (since we didn't have tiny black buttons) and glued them in place. This is where tweezers come in handy.

For the light saber (I only had white and green pipe cleaners, so my son chose white for Darth Vader) I cut a small rectangle of gray felt, hot glued the pipe cleaner to one end, rolled it up and hot glued the other end closed, then glued it to Darth Vader's "hand".

And here he is in all his dark glory.

We also made a Yoda finger puppet as the book had a template specific for it, although I actually had to alter the robe template because it didn't fit right over the body. It seems as though the people who made the book weren't too careful about testing the templates! And the scale was funky because the Yoda puppet was bigger than the Darth Vader puppet. Oh well.

But anyway, the kids loved them and they had a lot of fun playing with them and putting on a puppet show for me. Time well spent.

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