Bare arms

Read the previous post - making the hands - here.

Before making the clothes for my muppet, I have to finish making two other muppets. But the other two require visible bare arms - Doc just needs the foam tubes, since he will have long shirt sleeves in his costume.

So how do you make bare arms? Well, you cover the tubes with fabric of course. The Foam Book suggests that for bare arms you should use a ‘panel’ technique (each part of the arm is a shaped panel, which joins with each other panel to make a oblong-type arm), but this was just too much effort.

I decided to make some tube arms the way I had with Doc, but this time, make the arms into two parts - an upper arm and a lower arm. (Instead of one tube, with a tie in the middle for an elbow, see previous post.)

Now I have two tubes - I covered each one with some of my felt material that I was using for skin. But how to join the tubes together at the elbow?

That was a little bit of fiddly brilliance. I sewed together the front edge of the two tubes together - just halfway around the edges of the tubes. This created a hinge for the elbow. At the back edges of the tubes, I glued in a small piece of the felt to create an ‘elbow patch’; gluing the top and bottom ends of the felt into each end of the tube only. The left and right sides of the felt, I then sewed to each corresponding sides of the tubes - where there was a little gap left.

Fairly easy to do, I now have two bare arms for my other puppet.

The next post I will discuss how I make some blinking eyes to insert into one of my puppets.

(I have accidentally deleted a previous post about attaching the head to the body. My apologies; I am trying to retrieve it… Edit: 10th Jan 2007, it turns out that I can’t retrieve the post. How annoying! )