One question we seem to get quite frequently is “how did you start making puppets?” As a young girl of nine, JET began playing around with making very crude puppets. She was involved with the puppet ministry at her local church, and soon fell in love with the way puppets could tell stories to other children in a way that they would listen with rapt attention.
Being a very timid young girl, JET found that puppets allowed people to live vicariously through their puppets and enabled her to say and do things for the entertainment of others that they would not have even thought of doing as just themselves.
All through her years in school, she continued to take classes in things like sculpture, which enabled her to put “faces” on the fictional characters in her mind. For several years, she was not involved with puppets while she lovingly raised a family.
Then several years ago, a family member who was a youth Pastor, asked her to once again make puppets for him. From there, she began making puppets for American missionaries who traveled abroad and providing them to the missionaries at no cost.
As her skills continued to grow, JET became more and more absorbed in making her puppets better with attention to detail, functionality, durability and animated movement.
One thing led to another, and after several years of doing latex puppets and finding that they did not hold up well in some tropical countries, she was encouraged by a very kind professional performer to begin making soft sculptured puppets.
Almost immediately upon making the transition to soft sculpture, she found that this truly was the medium that she had be looking for through all these years.
Today, JET can use her vivid imagination, sketches, photos, or just a conversation with you the Vent to create wonderful people, animals, creatures or whatever you have in mind in a way that audiences love to see and hear.
She has never lost her desire to see her puppets used in ministries around the world to spread the precious gospel of her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ to young children and
to this day, signs every one of her puppets with the inscription “John 3:16” on the inside body liner.