Soft Sculptures and Marionettes - Upper Elementary and Middle School

A few summers back I offered one of the more advanced puppet making classes I've ever taught. The puppetry component was the easy part. The hard part was that kids no longer seem to learn sewing and I had to start from the very basic concept of threading a needle.

I taught the same two-week workshop twice.

The first time we worked only from patterns and made very large marionettes, which most of the kids decided they liked better as just soft sculptures.

These are the large soft-sculptures that came from that first attempt. The theme was "Create a Real of Imaginary Character." Elvis is center-stage.

The second time I scaled them down and bought pre-sewn un-stuffed muslim doll bodies, which made things go a lot smoother. The students could make two each and focus on character design instead of sewing. The objective was to create two characters that could interact with each other to tell a story.