Learn how to make a small tiger puppet perfect for child’s hands by scaling the pattern down to 65% in your printer settings.

Many customers have asked if its possible to reduce the size of puppets made from our sewing patterns to fit the little hands of preschoolers. Yes it is and it is so simple! Just adjust the scaling setting on your printer so the pattern reduces size to however small you want it to go. I was curious as to how small could I make the pattern but yet still be able to easily sew little pieces on the sewing machine. I had scraps of orange fleece laying around so I decided to make a tiger.

Adapting Our Lion Hand Puppet Sewing Pattern to Make a Mini Tiger

Since the lion looks so similar to a tiger, I never created a tiger sewing pattern because there were so many fleece tiger prints available at that time. Unfortuneately, tiger print fleece seems to have gone out of style so it is hard to find or very expensive. That’s not a problem with using orange fleece and black felt to turn the lion tiger-y.

How to Reduce the Size of the Pattern

First, I needed to choose how small I wanted the puppet. I discovered that setting the scaling setting on the printer to 65% was the perfect size for preschoolers. The blog post How to Reduce the Puppet Size has more tips about how to change the scaling on a printer and how to save paper when printing a pattern. It also gives approximations of how much to reduce a pattern to fit the hands of the different ages of kids. There is more information about the comparison between the different sizes of puppets and how small a puppet is when reduced to 65%.

Changes Made to Lion Sewing Pattern to Make the Mini Tiger

To modify our Lion Hand Puppet Sewing Pattern into a tiger I used these adaptations:
• When cutting out the pattern I didn’t cut out the mane since tigers don’t have manes.
• I used orange fleece instead of the recommended tan color for the lion.
• For the pattern piece named Inside Ear I used white felt instead of orange fleece.
• For the pattern piece named Bottom Mouth (in real life its the tiger’s jaw) I used white felt instead of orange fleece fabric. A tiger’s jaw is white not the color of the body like the lion.

I was so surprised to find out that even with all of those little tiny pieces it wasn’t hard to sew on my sewing machine. To my delight it took much less time to sew the little mini tiger puppet than a full sized puppet. I thought it would take longer since the pieces were smaller.

After machine sewing the hand puppet, I then hand sewed strips of black felt to resemble the stripes on a tiger.  Since the tiger is so small, I wasn’t able to put a lot of stripes on. With a larger puppet more stripes could be added.

I hand sewed the nose pieces together and then to the puppet. The lion has the large cartoon eyes which is in the lion pattern. Since the mini tiger is so small those types of eyes would be too big, plus they require being machine sewn. The flatter type of eye on the tiger is just layers of circles of black and white felt hand sewn together and then hand sewn on the puppet.

Preschoolers with small hands will love to play with this adorable mini tiger!

Do You Need the Lion Hand Puppet Sewing Pattern?

If so, you don’t have to go looking for it. Click on the lion and you can find more information about the pattern and also purchase it. Its a digital download so you can start sewing today.

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