Posted by Libby on Apr 17, 2025
I got the idea for The Hand a couple weeks before the protest, and for some reason I thought it would be easy. I thought I might even be able to make two of them! Fully articulated hands! before the protest.
Here is the first images of The Hand that I sent to our group chat:
From the beginning, I planned for it to be articulated, so I made each joint separately and connected them only with a strip of duct tape.
Here's the project a little further on, showing what a mess I made of my living room:
But eventually I got the whole thing covered with papier mache.
The first big issue ended up being the joints and the articulation of the joints. I wanted it to be that when you pulled on a string, the finger would curl up. It turned out that because of how I'd chosen to connect the joints, I had to go the other way - the fingers started curled and were straightened by pulling on a string.
This meant that the whole time I was wearing the puppet, I was fighting gravity to keep the fingers upright. Very annoying!
I hope to do a tutorial on joints in the future once I have a better techique figured out!
The second part I didnt realize until I had worn the puppet for about half an hour - it was very awkward to wear. It wasn't heavy, but the chickenwire was flexible so it kept settling over my shoulders and restraining my movement. I was constantly both pulling down on the strings to hold the fingers up and pushing the palm of the hand up off my arms.
In the future, I'm going to try to consider sustained wearability of my puppets much earlier in the process!
Do you have any questions about The Hand or how I made it? I can try to answer!