Happy Dog Felt Finger Puppet

My son enjoyed the felt finger puppet (and a snack)

One weekend, the kids and the grown-ups in the house were fidgety and I knew we needed to make a craft to get that energy out. It was an odd time of the day to go to the store so I pulled out all the leftover art materials we had and found several sheets of felt I hadn't used for a project months ago. It called to me! As my son started chatting about how much he loved our dogs, my thoughts moved from our dogs to animal crafts and eventually to animal finger puppets.

This craft took us about 25 minutes (minus the glue drying time). Feel free to switch out materials and infuse your style by using this as a baseline for your finger puppet project!

Recommended ages: 4-10 (but use your parental judgment!)

Love,

Auntie Meta

Materials:

• Googly eyes

• 2-3 sheets of felt in two-three colors

• Permanent marker or felt marker

• Glue or tape

• Ribbon (optional)

• Jingle bell (optional)

Steps:

1. Gather your materials. Talk with your child about what they would like the dog to look like. "What colors would you like your dog to be?" "Do you want your dog to have googly eyes or should we draw the eyes?" My son chose pink and red and wanted to use a bell on a collar. He also wanted "floppy" ears instead of pointy ears.

2. Choose the felt you want to use for the body of the puppet you will cut into a rounded oval or arc top. Make sure you have enough to cut two shapes of the same size. These will go on either side of your finger so you may want to measure to make sure they will be big enough to fit you or your child's finger.

3. Choose another piece of felt to cut out the ears into the shape you want. I recommend making the ears a bit smaller than the body.

4. Now, it's time to make the face. Cut out from felt or draw the nose on one of the body felt pieces. Make sure if you draw that you all agree on the shape and size :)

5. Cut out from felt or draw the mouth on the same body felt piece you put the nose on.

6. Glue on googly eyes (or draw eyes). If you choose to glue you may have to wait a minute or two unless you can do the next step gently...

7. Now, we put it all together! Glue around the top and side edges of the body felt pieces, being careful to leave the bottom flat edge alone. That is where your finger will need to go! Lay the two body felt pieces on top of each other. You may want to make a comment to your child about matching up the sides. (If you find that the glue doesn't hold, you can go back later and use hot glue later.)

8. This part is optional, but my son REALLY wanted a collar. Cut ribbon to size for it either to be wrapped and tied around the "neck" of the body or to glued only on the front. If you would like a bell on it like we did, we threaded the ribbon through our bell after cutting it to size. Then, we taped (and later glued) the ribbon on our finger puppet.

You're all done!

Finished dog felt puppet resting on Mom's knee