Easy Pipe Cleaner Finger Puppets

These pipe cleaner finger puppets are super easy to put together.  In less than 10 minutes you can make one little puppet for each little finger.   I love buying craft supplies from the dollar store, but I’m usually stumped on what to do with pipe cleaners.   But these puppets are a great use of dollar store materials!

I got the idea from Chirp Magazine for Kids by Owl. My in laws bought a subscription for our girls and Leah is just getting to the age where she loves flipping through the pages to see what’s inside (she just turned 4).  And I love flipping through the pages to find fun and inventive crafts for my kids!

These are so easy to make.  Take a pipe cleaner and wind it around your baby finger:

Wind it as tight as you can – remember, your kids’ fingers are a lot smaller than your fingers.

With the remaining end of the pipe cleaner, bend it into a loop and make the first ear:

Then bend the rest and make the second ear:

I have tried many times to use white glue to glue pom poms and pipe cleaners together.  Trust me, it’s not worth the hassle.  After waiting an hour or two for it to dry, the pom pom just falls right off.  I don’t pull my glue gun out often, but this is a great craft for it.  Put a dab of glue on the pom pom and stick it to the pipe cleaner, and within 30 seconds it’s ready to go:

That goes for the googly eyes too.  I definitely recommend using a hot glue gun to glue those little guys on too.

So that is pretty much it!  Here’s a photo of the back of the pipe cleaner finger puppet.   It’s nothing fancy, but it’s definitely neat and tidy.

Repeat with all your favourite colours.  Here’s a pink one with a purple feather as the hair (more dollar store craft supplies). Sorry for the fuzzy photo:

I’m not really sure what this little green guy is.  My husband joined in the fun and made him.  He kind of looks like some kind of flying insect, don’t you think?

And here’s our purple one with small ears:

And our orange one with monkey ears:

Leah (4 years old) was happy to model the finger puppets for me, but she was more into helping with the craft than playing with the finger puppets:

Kate on the other hand (almost 2 years old) loved playing with these finger puppets!  Maybe it’s because her big sister had them first, but she was so excited to have one little puppet for each little finger.

We have kept them on the dinner table the last few nights and Kate is super happy to scoop them up and put them on each of her fingers.  She’s really proud of herself when she gets them all on too.

And if she bends them the wrong way, no problem, she just passes them back and I can bend them back into shape.  So far, with the abuse of my two young kids, all of the little pom poms are still in tact, and we haven’t lost a single googly eye.  That makes me even more convinced that the glue gun is definitely the way to go!

These easy pipe cleaner finger puppets take less than 10 minutes to make.  Get your kids to choose the colour combinations and bend the pipe cleaners while you can do the glue gunning.  Or make these for your toddler and watch them play with delight as they try to get each little puppet on their fingers.  These are a fun and easy weekend craft project to do with you kids.

Source : onelittleproject.com
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