Another Set of Hands

As you seen from previous posts, I'm in the process of creating large figures.  With bigger bodies, one can create more detail and expression.  Two body parts are important for creating expression (or at least, there are two areas the human eye dwells upon); heads and hands.  This post details the construction of more detailed hands for the larger figures.

My small hands are made with fabric and chenille stems - works great but the joints are too rounded (if you bend a finger, your joint forms a point at the bend).  To provide a more realistic joint, I need to create bones or stiff areas.  This would only allow fingers to bend where they should.  After trying various beads and tubes, I realized that paper beads would be the perfect solution - stiff, lightweight, and free.  To create the beads, I rolled strips of glue-covered paper around fine knitting needles.

The chenile stems were threaded onto the tubes with space between the paper bones to allow for bending.  As you can see at the right, the fingers bend in a realistic manner.

Before making the fingers, I spent some time making a correctly sized template. This hand is about 50% the size of an adult hand.  If you try this yourself, don't be tempted to use a child's hand, the scale is different and won't look right.  Each finger and bone is mapped out (fingers are different sizes!) and the bones placed correctly on the chenille stems.

The fingers are sewn onto a palm of stiff interfacing (the type used for baseball caps) and the knuckles are padded with bits of felt. There is no stuffing in these hands (or any other type of hand I make) because stuffing nearly always creates a bizarre, swollen, snake-bitten affect. Look at your own hands; usually they are pretty flat.

The palms are padded with more felt near the fingers and the base of the thumb.  If you look at your own hand, you can see that these areas are a bit thicker than the rest of the palm. The finger chenille extends all the way to the wrist so that the entire hand can be inserted into the arm and the wrist bent if necessary.  Even though the hand/palm is stiffened, it is still movable and can assume any normal shape from a fist to fingers fully spread.

The outer covering is made from felted wool.  The usual method of inserting wire or chenille won't work here, so a layer of wool is pinned to the hand, edges turned under, and very carefully sewn by hand.  This was the most difficult and time consuming part of the process because the seam allowances were so tiny.  Thank goodness for felted wool.  I elected to use blue thread, so the stitches are visible.  

Stay tuned for more detail on this figure - he's quite the handsome fellow!