Sadly I simply failed to create a costume for my kids for Halloween this year, after just about managing for the last three years with my daughter (Happy Halloween, From the Depths, Webs of Shadow).

As I’m in a puppet phase at the moment I thought I’d go for something a bit different, and make Erin a dragon arm puppet that could potentially work with any costume.

The main problem is that I always just make these things up as I go along and they never work how I imagine. This puppet has a foam mouthpiece to which I sewed the ends of socks so that Erin’s little hand would be able to grip and open & close the jaws.

I then hot-glued foam shapes on to create the armature, and my bright idea was to use modroc to form the skin of the dragon over it, which could then be painted. Unfortunately the modroc didn’t really set and looked really bad, possible because it’s really really old.

So instead I cut out a piece of red fabric (a bit of an old t-shirt), draped it over and sprayed it many many times with frantic stiffener.

This didn’t seem to work (maybe wrong type of material?) so I tried coating it in a thin layer of watery modge podge, which so far appears to be a bit more effective but leaves a visible white layer on the material, so maybe I’ll see if I can paint it.

Anyway, that’s as far as I have got so far!

Here are some pictures of its development so far: