Part Eleven: Making the best of my mistakes

This page is entirely skippable—unless you, like me, make the occasional mistake when creating. You don’t need to read this to finish your muppet-style puppet, but you may benefit nonetheless!

So, let’s say it had been a while since your instructor had made a muppet-style puppet. And let’s say she kind of forgot to cut enough fabric for the head AND body, and ended up with this situation:

Ruh-roh.

My dear friend Cindy, an accomplished artist and children’s book illustrator, used to carry around a book, called Beautiful Oops. In a nutshell, it advised that, rather than try to cover up mistakes, artists should use them. What might be created out of the unintentional blob? Or a space where missing fabric should be?

And so, my dear friends, after adding in some of the missing fabric, I decided to give my muppet-style puppet a different colored tummy, like so:

and then I made a quick paper pattern . . .

Pattern paper folded in half, for symmetry

The pattern, unfolded and cut out

White fuzzy fleece tummy. Sewn in using Henson stitch. Also the finished arms.

WAIT!!! When did we do the arms???

We didn’t. They’re next!