Getting the limbs of shadow puppets to move freely, but also stay together and controlled during a show can be an issue. I’ve had many discussions with other puppeteers at various workshops about solutions to this problem. The most common one I’ve heard of and used, other than the hand made hinges, is those paper fasteners, sometimes called “brads”, that you can find at places like Staples. The problem I find with those is that they are bulky and they don’t allow the puppet to lie flat on the screen.

I found these figure eight hinges in an old out of print book by puppeteer Lotte Reiniger. I can’t use the wire she recommends (fuse wire has lead in it… which would be bad), but I found a wire that works fine. It seems to be available at craft stores and is fairly inexpensive. It took me a bit of practice to get the figure eight right, but once I got it, the hand made hinges let the puppet I was experimenting with lie flat and gave the limbs a nice fluid motion! Yay!