I finished Murry the Melonhead. I installed the built in hand rods and am trying to figure the two handed hand rod action. Here's a video of a improvised Murry mayhem :

He's cool. Did you have much trouble stopping the cloth  wrinkling as you pulled it around over the eyeballs? I find that tricky. Do you have  any  tips to  get it right?

. Thank fully the material round the eye camouflages it. I found a YouTube vid of a guy in Australia I think his name
 is Phillip, that fabricates his own eyes with PVC and then covers them with a thin polar fleece. And he started by cutting the material in a circle pattern and then weaving thread around the outside edge of the circumference then put the ball in the middle and then kind of cinch the thread or pull the thread taunt so that it stretches the fabric over the ball. And then to further get the wrinkles out of the ball I took the remainder of thread I had left attached to the ball and you kind of do a crisscross pattern on the Wrinkle,wrinkle to wrinkle and it kind of stretches it even further eliminating even more. I don't know if this helps but if you could find that video under puppet Eye making it might help. I may have even seen it on this site.

Your video is hilarious! Well done.

I found a YouTube vid of a guy in Australia I think his name is Phillip, that fabricates his own eyes with PVC and then covers them with a thin polar fleece.

That would be pagestep007 aka Philip. Philip is from New Zealand but lives in Columbia now. He has some great videos!

What an awesome looking puppet.
I recently tried fleece eyes too.
I cut a Styrofoam ball in half, covered it with PVA glue then stretched the fleece tight over the ball and used pins to hold it in place underneath. When the glue is dry, remove the pins and trim the overhang.
You get a nice tight finish on the fleece.


I also found that if you covered the Styrofoam with plastic wrap and then glue and shape the fleece over the plastic: You can make different styled and coloured eyelids etc that can be cut, shaped and pinned to the base eye and easily removed and changed.

With Easter just past  I picked up heaps of Styrofoam Easter eggs. Cut in half they make great fleece covered eyes too

I also found that if you covered the Styrofoam with plastic wrap and then glue and shape the fleece over the plastic: You can make different styled and coloured eyelids etc that can be cut, shaped and pinned to the base eye and easily removed and changed.

That is a great tip! I would have never thought of that one.

So funny that cat thought your puppet was life like. Head is beautiful and I like the hands.  When you want to go all the way up to cover ears you can put the bottom of the rods in the middle of your flat palm to get more height so that your fingers don't go above the stage. You can also rest one puppet wrist on the stage edge and move one arm alone.  If  you move the body to the side the hand resting on the edge will have implied movement.  If you think about it you only use one hand most of the time and the other rests close to your body. You don't often move your arms all the way out but keep them bent most of the time closer in and more waste height.  Fun thing about a puppet is that they don't have to move in normal fashion all the time, their arms don't get tired like ours do.  I like how you are thinking ahead about making the eyes changeable too.  Good Work.

cool video. Even the cat got into it! He's already developing a character. Looking forward to seeing some more of him.

the puppet is fantastic and you appear to already have a nice bit of control over the arms, it just takes a little playing around with and as Shawn has said, sometimes you don't need to have the arms moving al the time, implied movement is fine as the audience wouldn't be watching the arms all the time anyway, the bigger movement of the mouth and head covers the smaller movement of the arms in some way.

lol, and I love the fact that phillip (pagestep007) Is asking how you did your eyes and you are giving him advice using his own video!!

I also think that your cat is a comedy genius, its like you scripted all of that, I was literally laughing out loud at the interaction of murray and the cat, the sniffing of the hand, the argument of the cat trying to 'cat slap' the puppet, just brilliant and you had the hands and the head all looking like they where doing what you where trying to get them to do (looking at his hands and arms, sniffing his hand, stroking the cat, etc..)

Very nice, love the Character.