I Turned My Kermit Plush into a Puppet!

today i'm going to dissect my kermit plush and turn it into a puppet to the puppets of the world this may sound absurd but this is the place you need to be we'll do an interview and [Music] adam crootens are here and i'm sure a lot of people out there would love to have their own kermit puppet and if you've been following this channel for a while you know that making a puppet is not as easy as it looks but today to make things a little easier rather than starting from scratch we're gonna use a stuffed kermit hi holder wait you're gonna want that's right good grief now there's many different kermit plush dolls that have been made over the years from the pictures online this one looked like it would be about the right size though it might be a little bit small for my hand i think it might still work the tag says that this one was made from eden toys and i just looked it up and it looked like it's from the early 90s and i'm sure these techniques would work with almost any kermit plush that you can find i always recommend to make your own puppet from scratch it's much easier than altering existing pieces a lot of times converting a stuffed animal into a puppet sounds a lot easier but it never turns out to be as nice of quality of a puppet and you tend to run into a bunch of unexpected headaches i'm sure we're gonna run into a couple today too anyway let's get started now the first thing we have to do before we dissect this frog is to take off this vest it's only held in with a couple stitches so i'm just going to use a seam ripper to take those out and this is actually a nice little vest so i might actually save this so i can use it on a future puppet and we'll do the same with the bow tie you can see there there's just some little threads there i'm gonna pull out okay now we're ready to dissect this frog first thing i want to do is make an entrance hole into the bottom of the plush now this is one of the problems that you get when you are cutting apart an existing stuffed animal is when you cut across one of these seams here that are stitched up it could make this whole puppet unravel so the first thing i'm going to have to do after i make a cut through one of these stitches is put a little bit of glue there so it doesn't keep unraveling so let me cut in that entrance hole now let's find out what is inside kermit the frog all right whoo look at that ah rough day huh buddy pull all these guts out so now look at that some of the stuffing is from inside the legs i'm gonna leave some of that stuffing in there now i can also see that there are some stitches in the corner of the mouth that's what keeps it from staying open all the way while the head is stuffed so let me get that stitch out of here be careful not to rip the fabric look at that he is deflated this poor kermit is like a deflated balloon now oh my gosh let me turn them inside out just to see what we're working with now there is this plastic mouth plate thing that's also part of what keeps his mouth open and looking under this it looks like there's a nice fake leather here that will act as a really good mouth plate so i don't think we need this plastic at all so let me just carefully take these seams out of the plastic now this little piece of plastic might make a good mouth plate for a future puppet click right here if you want to see how to make a simple puppet that you can use this mouth plate for now if you see these little pegs here that are sticking out that's on the back of the eyes these little posts are what hold the stuffed animal eyes in and keep them from falling out it's a safety protection thing for a choking hazard the problem with this for a puppet though is that it's really uncomfortable on the back of your hand you're not going to want these pegs poking into the top of your wrist not only is it uncomfortable but also it'll make the eyes move in unpredictable ways that will not look realistic so what i think i'm going to do is actually cut these pegs off and then re-glue the eyes on at the end unfortunately there's no great way to get these off and don't forget to wear eye protection when doing this all right now that we have the eyes off what i have to do is cut these little pegs off too all right that's much better but there's one little problem when i go to glue these onto the kermit head because there's some hollow spots there's not a lot of surface area for the glue so i'm gonna fill those sections right now i typically probably use like an epoxy resin to fill that in but today i'm just gonna use hot glue [Music] okay and we'll let those sit for a little bit all right now they're filled in i'm just gonna sand them a little bit flatter then we'll be able to move on all right that's perfect now now before we work on the body let me turn this back inside out and see if my hand even fits inside of it huh that's actually not too bad my hand fits in it it is a little bit snug but it does fill out the head kind of nicely good grief it's definitely starting to look like a real muppet speaking of the muppet my good friend and co-host from the podcast cameron garrity just started a new series that he calls the muppet no in this mini series that has episodes that are only one minute long cameron shares a lot of fun facts about the muppets and a lot of unknown muppet history here's a short one it's time once again for the muppet know where i tell you about some of my favorite parts of muppet history i want to talk about one of my favorite puppetry moments from the muppets most wanted this is the movie where kermit gets sent off to a gulag in russia where the recent muppet movies have been rightly criticized for their over reliance on blue and green screen techniques uh if you know you know this moment where kermit gets sent to the prison is so brilliant in its simplicity i had to give it its own video kermit gets hoisted by a whole gang of prisoners and you see his entire body flailing above the crowd but eagle eye fans will notice that one of those prisoners is actually steve whitmire so the puppeteer of kermit whose primary job is not to be seen by camera is literally standing there hiding in plain sight he's right there you can see him more easily when they cut to the wide again they could have relied on a digital solution but sometimes the best idea is the easiest one i'll see you next time on the muppet if you enjoyed that cam has tons of episodes on his tick tock and instagram be sure to like and follow for more anyway back to our kermit because he looks pretty creepy without the eyes now i'm going to save attaching the eyes till the end but one thing i don't like about this puppet is this floppy body here and looking at this closely because of the scale of this puppet there's no way i'm gonna be able to get foam in there with my arm so what i think i'm gonna do instead is make a small fabric tube that goes from the top of the neck to the bottom here and then before i stitch it in i'm going to put some of this stuffing back to fill out the body let's see if it works first thing i'm going to do is measure his neck hole so it's about nine inches at the neck about 13 inches at the base i'm going to use this old t-shirt fabric for today so i doubled this fabric in half so i have to cut those numbers in half so for the 13 instead of 13 i'm going to use seven and a half so let me go from here to about seven and a half i'm also gonna mark halfway between that i'm gonna go seven inches up seven inches up four point five there we go that's all stitched up now let's stitch it into our puppet first thing i'm gonna do is pin it in i'm pinning the top of this to the neck hole now i'm just going to stitch that in okay so the neck is all stitched in now stitch to the bottom you can see the seam is coming apart where it was stitched before i'm just going to stitch that closed before i do the rest of the puppet now before i do my last couple stitches to close this up i want to put some stuffing into the body now you don't want to put the stuffing into the middle of the puppet you want to put it between the lining and the skin of the puppet and you're definitely not going to want to put all the stuffing back in it would be way too bloated if you did that okay that looks pretty good now let me stitch up this last piece there we go he's filled out pretty nicely it's a little tough to make sure you kind of work that stuffing all the way around so i've kind of had a pull at it and tug in a couple spots but i think that looks much better now before we stick his eyes on why don't we give him some fingers too if you look here his hand is more like a paddle what i want to do is separate these fingers to do that i'm just going to use scissors now you could stitch between all these fingers but that would take a long time and it might not even look that good today i'm just going to use some hot glue click right here if you want to learn how to make arm rods for your puppet too these will allow me to use this plush like a real puppet now you could use hot glue to attach the eyes but today i'm going to use contact cement i o girl with the frog here get over here frog good grief sorry for those cringy impressions but if you really would like a kermit the frog puppet and you're intimidated by doing a real puppet build this is actually a fine option now it's definitely far from perfect at least with this plush that i'm using it's a little bit on the small side but it definitely kind of works out some of the proportions are off a little bit but without a doubt given i was able to get this on ebay for 30 dollars and really only did about an hour worth of alterations it turned out pretty good but a few weeks ago i posted a video on how to make a custom frog puppet that build is a little bit more than a weekend project but you will end up with a perfect professional puppet i even have a pattern for it on my website there's links to that down below if you enjoyed this build definitely consider subscribing over the last couple years i have made tons of videos on how to make puppets time lapse videos of really cool characters like baby yoda and figment and we even have a podcast called puppeteers where we've even interviewed a ton of puppeteers who perform with the muppets now this technically is not a replica puppet but i have made a bunch of replicas of muppets in the past here's a few of the photos and you might even find some videos of these if you dig deep enough into my youtube channel these are really old photos and videos you can probably tell from my hair and maybe if this video gets enough likes i'll do an updated replica build like comment subscribe make sure to check out the merch store and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Puppet Nerd

Views: 2,436,069

Keywords: adam, kreutinger, puppets, DIY, maker, cosplay, How to make, how to, muppet, muppets, how to make a puppet, How to make a muppet, tutorial, building, 101, Kermit the frog, Plush, Plushies, Stuffed animal, Stuffed animal into a puppet, Kermit impression

Id: 6booB4T0GYk

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021