To catch you up on what I spent the last several weeks building, I’m going to be posting some photos that I took during the build.

The wood witch needed hands capable of picking things up. Fortunately, you can find such a thing in your local neighborhood hardware store. This trick won’t work for a lot of puppets, but the wood witch was the perfect size for using grabber arms.

First thing was to rough cut and glue a piece of foam to the grabber arm to represent the other fingers. I’m using an ethafoam because it is stiff, but not rigid. I don’t want it to flop around but a rigid foam would be snap off.

I used a razor blade to carve the fingers into shape. I wanted something that looked like the grabber, but also was rootlike and a little, well, more finger-shaped.

I papier-mached the arm, leaving lots of wrinkles in the paper to give it a bark-like texture. We want the whole puppet to look like she’s made with a bundle of twigs.

And here they are finished. When I got to the arms, I switched to cloth mache. It will flex a little, if the fingers catch on something, but will give the same texture as the paper. I painted them with acrylic. Adding a few silk oak leaves to the hands and arms completed the picture.