Noah's Ark

Every year, Embroidery Library send me a voucher for my birthday. I went for a bit of a look around their site to see what I would like and found this awesome "in-the-hoop" Noah's Ark Puppet pack. In-the hoop means the whole puppet is made in the hoop. There is no having to stitch it all together at the end, the embroidery machine makes the whole thing. Ingenious!



I ended up getting a pretty good deal out of the whole thing. In addition to being able to take $10 off my order, the same weekend as my birthday, they had a deal going where you could get 40% off your order, and receive three free designs as well. I was able to combine this deal with my birthday deal and ended up paying about $5 for a $25 set. Embroidery library always has great deals going, so I hardly ever end up paying full price for anything there. If you've got an embroidery machine, they are well worth signing up to. Just make sure you tell them your birthday.



Anyway, so I had a bit of fun sewing up these cute little puppets. I am very tempted to go back and buy the fairy-tale set as well. I've told myself that I need to make more of the animals before I start buying any more puppet packs. Really, being a Noah's Ark set, I should be making two of each.



A few little tips I would give someone making these:

• Instead of spray glue, get yourself a Sewline glue pen. It's nowhere near as messy, and much easier to just put a dab where you need it. You use it instead of using pins just to hold everything in place. I found the spray glue stuck a little too well, and with some of the felt it stretched it out of shape a bit.

• Use good quality felt. Some of the felt I used was cheap polyester stuff from my local shop and from Spotlight. You can really tell the difference between the two tigers. The one on the left was made using felt from Plushka, the other was made using the cheap felt. It is so worth spending the extra money to get really nice felt, these little guys don't use very much anyway. The zebra was also made using cheap felt, whilst the Panda was Plushka and the pig and the Monkey were made using felt from Winterwood.

• You can skip a lot of the colour changes by using the same colour thread for a bunch of steps. For most of these puppets I used just three colours of thread, one to match the main felt colour, and then the black and white for the eyes (though sometimes I used silver and dark sepia). Generally, for the first four colour changes I used the same colour thread as the felt and then again for the last colour change.

It's been great fun making these little finger puppets. I would like to try more different kinds of puppets, maybe even design some myself? Do your kids like playing with puppets? Did you play with them when you were little? Have you ever made any puppets? Do you know of any good puppet patterns?

Come and join me and some other crafters over at And Sew We Craft...