I HAVEN'T BUILT A PUPPET IN AGES SO NATURALLY MY COMEBACK PROJECT IS KERMIT THE FROG, THE MOST BELOVED PUPPET EVER CONSTRUCTED, NO PRESSURE

So here’s a confession that’s been sitting in my chest like a swallowed marble: I haven’t built a puppet in an embarrassingly long time. I don’t even want to count the months. You know how it goes — the foam goes in a bin, the bin goes in a closet, the closet door closes, and then your ADHD brain does its little out-of-sight-out-of-mind magic trick and an entire craft just… evaporates. Not dead. Not abandoned. Just dormant. Hibernating under a pile of half-painted Skaven and a banjo I keep meaning to pick back up. And then, a few weeks ago, the itch came back. I don’t know what triggered it. Maybe it was writing Muppet of the Week every single Monday and steeping my whole brain in felt for months. Maybe it’s that puppetry is the hobby I keep returning to — I’ve been doing foam construction since at least 2012, which in hobby-years makes it practically a marriage. Whatever it was, I caught myself standing in front of that closet, opening the bin, running a thumb across a sheet of…