Image note: The stock photo is illustrative. It does not show Westville’s workshop, the rainbow worm, its participants, or the parade.
At Coogan Pavilion in New Haven’s Edgewood Park, New Haven Independent reporter Judy Lee and her friend arrived at a Saturday puppet-making workshop without a plan. Organizer Muffy Pendergast did not hand them a design to copy. Lee flipped through binders of illustrations, and she and Emily chose a giant rainbow worm. Their first challenge was figuring out how to turn flat cardboard into a rounded body.
Pendergast was working on a giant seahorse of her own, using ridged cardboard, a juice bottle and a pair of leggings. The pavilion held flattened and whole cardboard, including boxes from deliveries, along with a tub of puppet tools, paint, tape, hot glue and child-safe cardboard cutters. The New Haven Independent reported that paint was available for people who had only one day to make a puppet. The assortment made it possible to start with the materials at hand.
The workshop was part of the preparation for Westville’s 16th annual Giant Puppet and People Making Mayhem Parade. A poster photographed at the pavilion listed free workshops on Saturdays and Sundays in October at Coogan Pavilion. Open Studios New Haven’s official 2026 schedule lists the parade for Sunday, Nov. 1, at 11 a.m. in Edgewood Park, where it will close the month-long arts program.
The reporter and her friend first imagined a caterpillar. As beginners, they found it difficult to shape cardboard into spheres, so they changed course. They lightly scored flat pieces, bent them against the side of a table and closed the ends with cardboard circles. The pieces came out more like cylinders than balls. Instead of starting over, the pair treated the cylinders as segments for a worm.
That change kept the project moving. They taped the segments together at one table, then carried them to another where strips of The New York Times Book Review and a thick plant-based paste were ready. The paste was methyl cellulose. They dipped newspaper in it, smoothed away excess and layered the strips over the cardboard. The reporter described the paste as having the texture of gel. The process was hands-on and slow enough for conversation; they adapted the design as the shape emerged.
The report described people returning on later weekends and leaving unfinished puppets at the pavilion between sessions. That arrangement gave projects time to grow over several visits, while still leaving room for someone to make something in a single day. The workshops were not limited to a polished plan: participants could test a shape, discover it was not working and use the same pieces another way.
For the rainbow worm, the builders mounted its cardboard body on bamboo sticks used for the parade. They had not finished it at the time of the report. The pair planned to use a tomato trellis for a tapered tail and find cloth to connect the segments so the puppet could move. After the paper layers hardened, they hoped to return and paint the worm in rainbow colors. Those were plans, not a promise that the puppet would be completed.
Pendergast’s own seahorse showed a different route through the same pile of materials. A plastic bottle became its snout, and the puppet had enough flexibility for the bottle to bob when it moved. The reporter described Pendergast testing how to make that movement work. Her experiments offered a practical lesson for beginners: the material itself can suggest what a puppet might become.
The project’s scale also made collaboration visible. The report describes Lee and Emily making and adjusting one segment at a time, mounting the worm on bamboo and planning cloth connectors so it could move. Pendergast’s open-ended approach left them responsible for choosing their own idea, while supplies and an experienced builder were available nearby.
Open Studios New Haven says its 2026 program brings galleries, studios and events across New Haven, Westville and West Haven from October into November. Its schedule places the puppet parade at the end of that month of public arts activity. The poster at the workshop invited people to return across the fall weekends, giving the parade a visible, shared process before the day it steps through the park.
The rainbow worm began with a failed attempt at spheres and a decision to keep using the cardboard anyway. By the time the pair mounted its segments on bamboo, they had a clear next step and an unfinished project they wanted to revisit. The workshop’s record is specific: reused cardboard, newspaper, paste, bamboo and an idea that changed shape as two beginners worked. The Nov. 1 parade is still ahead, with the public schedule placing it in Edgewood Park at 11 a.m.
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