Marionette: A DIY Guide to Making Your Own 9-String Puppet

This book will be available from the 3rd September 2026. 

The story

This book began as a single, practical question: how can we teach you to make your own marionette? Little Angel Theatre Associate Director and marionette maker Oliver Hymans set out to answer it in the plainest possible terms:  a step-by-step guide that needs no workshop and no formal training, only patience and a few evenings’ work. The marionette in the guide was built by marionette maker trainee Jess Shead, following the same instructions you’ll find inside.

But a craft can’t be reduced to instructions alone. Marionette making survives in Britain today because a small number of people have kept it alive, largely through apprenticeship rather than institutions. In 2023, marionette making was added to the Heritage Crafts Association’s Red List of Endangered Crafts. This book exists partly to change that.

Alongside the guide, the book highlights some of the people who matter to the craft’s history from past, to present and future. The three essays by Oliver Hymans, Sarah Wright and puppeteer Stephen Mottram, place the craft in that wider context which has captivated audiences for centuries, and how it so nearly disappeared.