Custom Hand Puppets
If you’re looking for custom ventriloquist hand puppets, talking puppets, moving mouth puppets or muppet style puppets, you’ve come to the right place. All of our custom muppets are handmade in Edinburgh – just send us a picture or description of what you want to get a quote!
Hand Puppet Features
All our custom hand puppets are different, but here are some features that apply to the majority of our hand puppets.
- Foam inner head
- Stuffed and lined face and body
- Reinforced, movable mouth
- Can be any size
- Full or half body
- Optional arm rods
- Optional extras include blinking eyes, moving eyebrows and wiggling ears!
- Latex head option
- Five year guarantee
New – Latex Hand Puppets
Our latex hand puppets offer a huge range of different facial expressions and detailed scultped textures. Find out more about our made to order latex puppets here.
Hand Puppet Pricing
The following price ranges are a guideline, and prices vary greatly depending on your design.
- Humanoid Hand Puppets – £385-710
- Animal Hand Puppets – £550 – £900
Get in touch for a quote. Send us an image, or try our design service. You can email or write to us.
Our Glove Puppets are a cheaper option than hand puppets – find out more about these here.
Examples Of Moving Mouth Puppets
What’s the difference between a hand puppet and a glove puppet?
In a nutshell, our custom hand puppets have a movable mouth, and are larger and more structured. Glove puppets have a simple glove shape and a moving head and arms.
Here is some more info about the differences between hand puppets and glove puppets.
More About our custom hand puppets
Our custom hand puppets are a popular choice for ventriloquists, film and TV as well as schools and families. They typically have a moving mouth and are 3D and structured.
Hand puppets are very versatile. They can be pretty much any shape and size, so long as they are big enough to fit your hand into the head. In addition to the standard moving mouth, talking puppets can also have moving eyebrows, blinking eyes, jointed limbs, arm rods and lots of other fun things added to them, which can make them really life like. There is no limit to how much detail we can add!
It is very easy to move the mouth, even if you’ve never done it before. However you can also spend years practicing and still have things to learn! There are lots of excellent puppeteering courses you can do do sharpen your puppetry skills!
Custom Muppet Heads
The heads of our foam based custom muppets are usually sculpted in foam, which is firm and springy enough to make the mouth comfortable to operate. For every puppet, we draft a unique pattern for the skull – no two are quite the same. This is normally an iterative process involving a first draft and several adjustments. Another option is a latex head; these can be very realistic and include a lot of detail.
Puppet Bodies
Depending on the body shape of your custom muppet, there may be several possible entry points for your hand. In these cases, we will chat with you to decide which entry point will be the most suitable for your particular requirements.
Our hand puppets are lined and have tapes around the mouth so that you can get a good grip. Other facial controls such as eyebrow mechanisms and blink mechanisms are also located inside the head, and there is an opening in the lining above the hand puppet’s moving mouth so that you can access these.
We have a huge range of fabrics available to us and will show you samples before we start making your puppet.
Puppet Clothing
We can make any clothing you like for your puppet, ranging from jeans and T shirt made to fit a hippo to accurate replica Victorian undergarments to fit a tiny human puppet! Sometimes We can use buy children’s clothes and alter them to fit the puppets, and sometimes we make the clothing to order. Our team have a huge breadth of couture experience.
All of our custom hand puppets are guaranteed for five years.