Hi everyone, myself and some of the youth dept. at my church have been invited to do a couple of storyteller type small shows for Agrofest at the end of this month, Agrofest is a festival that showcases fresh produce in this country. The theme of our shows is to promotion healthy eating with fresh fruit and veg. The first will be a fairy tale plus more info on the benefits of fresh produce, however, the second will have a superhero, he's gonna be kinda dorky, in a lovable way. Have some questions...

1. How do I print a pdf pattern to say a 200% size? I want this superhero to be much bigger than the others.

2. Do I just cut out foam shapes and glue them on, symmetrically, to make his muscles and sixpack? Then put him in a tight top/tshirt? I was thinking to perhaps make some layers of fleece, draw a muscle on paper and then place it on the fleece layers and draw round it with a sharpie pen and then sew along the sharpie pen line and cut out the shape to glue onto the chest, stomach, arms, that way each muscle would be more uniformed? What do you think?

3. I'm still having problems with arm rod attachments, I want to do it as simply as possible. I have tried velcro patches on the inside wrists, with velcro wrapped around a length of dowel, but it always, eventually comes undone. What can I use that you can buy in a hardware store, or possibly have at home to do this, we don't have much choice here and a lot of things you mention on this forum, we don't get here. Is there a gauge of wire that I could buy and simply bend around the wrist... or something? Ideas would be most welcome.

4. Any suggestions/advise about superhero puppets are very welcome.

So I await responses - especially the pdf question.
I know I have more questions, especially when I start building him, but these are enough for the moment.

BTW Daryl, I came up with the name FreggieMan all by myself, I promise, then I realized that he's a canadian mascot, lol.

Also, I came across this by jomama, really cool!
Wouldn't this body shape be good for a superhero?

On the Radio Control forum there is a free program called Scale and Tile...it works great and will allow you to resize patterns...pictures...etc

Dennis

I have a Brother 6490CW printer so I can do it manually.I found this link below.........if nothing else take it to the UPs store or a place that can enlarge it for you.


Billy D.

http://ask-leo.com/how_can_i_enlarge_a_pdf_for_printing.html

where is the Radio Control forum at Dennis? that program sounds useful

You can use a program called proposter. It has a free evaluation version which is enough for resizing patterns. In this thread you can find a link to download

http://puppetsandstuff.com/community/index.php/topic,3689.msg32103.html#msg32103

I have a Brother 6490CW printer so I can do it manually.I found this link below.........if nothing else take it to the UPs store or a place that can enlarge it for you
http://ask-leo.com/how_can_i_enlarge_a_pdf_for_printing.html

sounds interesting... We don't have copymachines in the nabourhood who enlarge only 10% they do 45 or 200 %
I have to enlarge project puppet patterns............

I scale my pattern with adobe illustrator. After scaling I divide the pattern to several sheets.
So I print it out and glue it back together. If you want I can help you with that.
You can draw the muscles on foam, cut it out and cover it with fabric.
Then you can sew it on the body.
Thats the way I done it with Hulk Hogan and Marc my Devil.

Rosie,

If dowel rods are all you can find where you are then you can use those and embed them in the hand. The first thing you would want to do is cut a small slot in the top of the dowel rod from the top down about an inch or so.  Then take a round piece of cardboard or better yet a thin piece of wood and glue it down into the dowel. You want something on the top of the dowel that looks like a little paddle.  Now glue that paddle inside between your two pieces of foam that you are making the hand out of. 

The difficult thing about using this method is getting the fabric covering over the foam hand.  You have to either have a small hole in the seam where the dowel comes out of the hand and thread that up onto the dowel from the bottom till you can then put the fabric over the hand or you need to leave the bottom half of the seam open and cover the hand then hand stitch the bottom seam around the dowel rod.

Thank you so much for the input so far everyone,
@ Billy, after realizing that adobe don't have that facility, I 'saved' the pdf as a jpeg, I now have it loaded in photoshop, I just checked the size in inches and each page is the size of a regular letter sized piece of paper. I'm going to try enlarging it by 50% to see what size it is.
@ Shaun, I never thought of this, can this work with fiberfilled hands though? The arms are rolled foam, but I have problems covering with fabric, hence the fiberfill.
@Kai, thanks for the offer, I'd really appreciate that.

Rosie,

Yes it should work with a fiber fill hand.  Before you stuff the hand with fiberfill put the rod with the "paddle" on the end into the hand.  Then try to stuff around the paddle so you have fiber fill on each side of the "paddle" 

How do you make your arm and hand covering?  Do you make it all in one then turn it and stuff the hand then insert the rolled foam for the arms?   The reason I ask is because it may be a bit hard to get the rod and paddle into the hand if you do this.  You might need to leave the seam in the hand open, opposite of the thumb, where the rod should be coming out. Then once you have the arm and hand turned you would place the paddle end up into the hand then stitch around the rod.  Then stuff with poly fill.  I hope that all makes sense.