My Personal Puppet Ministry saga continues! If you missed previous posts in this series, you can catch up here:
Puppet Grace
Picking a Puppet Pal

Click on the link below to listen to an MP3 audio recording of today’s post.
The transcript follows, with a few photos for illustration.
Audio: Picking a Puppet Pal-Part 2

Picking a puppet pal for personal puppet ministry, continued …

Thanks for joining me again on my personal puppet ministry journey. As I explained in a previous post in this series, personal puppet ministry is what I call a solo puppeteer and his/her puppet pal sharing God’s love by chatting back and forth in front of an audience, basically playing the “role” of themselves. Future posts will get into performance and ministry topics. Right now, I’m just getting started, and the first step is coming up with my puppet pal.

In my previous post, I narrowed down my search to the general category of hand puppet. Then the idea of converting a stuffed animal toy into a one-of-a-kind hand puppet really appealed to me. Luckily, a few good candidates were already sitting around the house, including the little teddy bear, brown cow, and collie dog pictured above.

A puppet pal to crow about

My favorite is the black crow. It has big googly eyes, dangly yellow feet, stubby wings, and a big yellow beak. Right away, great ideas rolled into my head for ministry skits and scripted conversations that could be custom-made for a black bird puppet pal. The possibilities are pretty exciting.

But what about the construction? Could the stuffed crow toy be remodeled into a workable hand puppet?

Looking the situation over, the conversion wouldn’t be easy, but it should be do-able. The stuffing is quite stiff, but if I take enough stuffing out of the body and head, and position the opening for my hand just right, I think I’ll be able to nod the crow’s head by flexing my wrist.

Look how large the beak is! And it has separate upper and lower jaws. If enough stuffing is taken out to fit my thumb into the lower jaw and one finger into the upper jaw, I think I can pinch them together to open and shut the beak when the crow talks.

Since I’m not a ventriloquist, my lips will move no matter which one of us is supposed to be speaking. It would be a plus, to be able to emphasize when it’s the puppet’s turn to talk by having its mouth open and close. A movable mouth also adds a terrific tool for conveying emotions with facial expression.

My puppet pal’s design needs to take into account my arthritic hands. Opening and closing the beak might put too much strain on my fingers. If that happens, I can always choose to do without the beak movement, no harm done.

What about flapping the wings? That would be cool. The wings on this crow aren’t very large, and they’re stitched to the outside of the body instead of opening up into the body cavity. So there’s no ready-made tunnel for my fingers to slide into, to flap the wings from the inside. Even if there were, I’m not sure I could reach my short fingers into the wings and also into the beak and also into the head. All in all, it’s not worth the trouble of reconstructing the wings to create finger pockets.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to settle for non-moving wings. Remember the hand-and-rod style of puppet we looked at last time? I could attach rods to the outside of the crow’s wings, and use my other hand to hold the rods and maneuver them to move the wings.

But… I’d rather leave that hand free to do other things. Removable rods might be a good solution. I could attach them to the wings for special skits that would benefit from the extra wing motion. For ordinary situations, I could sneakily flick the wings with my free hand.

Speaking of removables, my live human pal Greg Jenkins suggested sewing patches of Velcro onto the crow’s wings, so that my puppet pal could hold a lightweight prop for a particular skit. A Velcro patch or two on its head would help hold a hat or other special item in place, too. I love that element of versatility. One advantage of the crow’s black body color is that black Velcro patches would be practically invisible to the audience.

One downside of the black body is that things I don’t want to be invisible might be. The wings especially might blend in too much. Adding brightly colored feathers or other trim to the edges of the wings might help. And I’d need to wear clothing that would contrast with the crow, to make a good background for it.

See all the ideas that are popping up? Of course, ideas are one thing. Making them happen is another thing. Turning this crow toy into a puppet would take a lot of work and ingenuity. And that’s not counting adding embellishments to give it a good “pal” personality.

In the mooood for puppet ministry

Meanwhile, there’s another candidate for my personal puppet ministry pal. She isn’t a puppet, but she’s already kind of a pal.

After my husband was seriously injured in a farm accident in 2016, this stuffed cow served as my cuddly pillow when I slept alone in hotel rooms and at home while Bill spent weeks in various hospitals. She’s super-soft, very touchable. The stuffing in her body is so supple and loose that I can sit her on my knee and move her head by simply grasping the nape of her neck and twisting a little (see pic below). Her front legs are quite easy to maneuver, too. And this is all without making a hand pocket inside her body, so no surgery required.

My cow’s mostly white body is a more high-maintenance color than the black crow, especially if kids pet her soft fur with sticky fingers. But a surface wash ought to clean her up okay.

She does not have a movable mouth. In fact, she has no mouth at all, just a pink muzzle with embroidered nostrils. We’d have to rely on our voices and body language to signal to the audience which one of us is speaking.

It will be a challenge to convey her emotions with a face that has no mobility at all. But this can be done through her voice and body language, too. Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood did this beautifully, especially with his shy puppet pal, Daniel Tiger, who also had an immobile embroidered face.

My cow is black and white, just like the real Holsteins on our farm. Her eyes are small black beads, and they’re pretty much impossible to see next to the black patches on her face. Eyes are really important for establishing a relationship with the audience, so this is one feature I’d have to modify to use her for personal puppet ministry. Maybe a light blue or light green paint job on the button eyes would help. Or maybe I’d need to add a pair of bigger button eyes or googly eyes. Or long eyelashes, which real cows actually do have, by the way. Or eyeglasses, which real cows usually don’t have.

Eyeglasses would give her a much more distinctive look, and lead to some interesting topics of conversation between me and my pal. But it would be a hassle to keep them in place, especially when I scrunch my cow’s head around. Would eyeglasses be worth the effort? Let’s try them to see how they work.

Testing, testing …

First, I covered the cow’s eyes with blue paper and drew in black pupils and sort of eyelids so that she wouldn’t have scary round bug-eyes. The blue eyes stand out much better than the plain black beads.

I also popped the lenses out of a pair of Dollar Store sunglasses that fit onto the cow’s head pretty well. Not a bad look.

The glasses aren’t really necessary, though, with the blue eyes. “Simpler is better,” I say, so … we’ll go with the blue eyes, no eyeglasses. I’ll tuck the glasses into my stash of puppet accessories. They might come in handy for a skit later on.

The verdict

Both the crow and the cow are very promising potential puppet pals (say that a few times fast!). I’ll go forward with the cow for now, because she’s ready to use right away. I’ll get to work on the black crow when I have time to make the necessary modifications. Time will tell which one will become the primary pal for my personal puppet ministry.

I hope you’re finding your perfect puppet pal, too. Let us know by posting a comment. ♥ Have fun, and God bless!

—Linda

Upcoming topics: Picking a great name and an engaging personality for our puppet pals: Puppet Pal ~ Personality Plus

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