The Smile Stitchers

Sometimes, when we are teaching the very young, and one of them is sad sad sad, my wonderful partner will draw the smallest happy face on their tiny little index finger. It's almost guaranteed that it will result in a smile (I can't think of a time that it has not worked, actually). Of course, the desire for this novelty will immediately spread like wildfire, and soon the entire class will want happy faces, sad faces, mustaches, eyelashes, and so on and so forth....Gone will be any hope of teaching correct hand positions, or puppet history, and instead we will have a class in love with finger puppets.

Because of this inescapable truth, today I felt like it was necessary to give a shout out to a group of ladies called the Smile Stitchers. For the past 36 years, this troop from the First Baptist Church of Richardson, Texas (outside of Dallas) has built 20,000 finger puppets a year for the Children's Medical Center in Dallas. This group consists of 45 members, most of whom meet once a month to cut, and some volunteers then take the pieces home to stitch and adorn. The finger puppets are not all alike - they come in a variety of characters and animals. The ladies say that each puppet takes about 30-40 minutes to build. For those of you doing the math, that is 15,000 hours of manpower annually. 20,000 puppets! Granted, they are finger puppets, but that seems incredibly taxing.

There is very little history about the origins of finger puppets. Maybe because it is like researching the origins of the ball...I'm sure that as soon as a child or a mother figured out that it was an amusing distraction, it spread as quickly as it does in one of our classes. I think that it is important to note that no matter how savvy we get, we are all still mesmerized by the same basic thing: giving life to something that we know in our minds isn't real. But our hearts just won't keep up, huh?