Photo by Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Thistledown Puppets founder Philip Hatter cuts material for a new creation.

Philip Hatter is all grown up now. But he still remembers his favorite toy.

"It was a monkey puppet," said Hatter, who received it as a Christmas present when he was 7. "It had those arms and legs that Velcro around you, and I named him Rascal."

His brother, Sean, got one, too. "They were like our little friends."

Twenty-eight years later, Hatter is still "playing with puppets and proud of it," as his T-shirt proclaims.

And small wonder. The former picture framer has managed to parlay a childhood passion into a living.

Hatter's Thistledown Puppets is now a full-time business. And with friend Alex Lucas, Hatter has created and produced "Bull: A Puppet Musical," which debuted at the Roanoke Arts Festival last fall.

In July, Hatter and Lucas got an all-expenses paid trip courtesy of a British entertainment company to work with professional actors on a brand new production of "Bull" -- in the Greek isles.

It's all pretty heady stuff for a 35-year-old Roanoker who had a day job not so long ago.

One by one

In an age of mass production, Hatter's puppets are hand-crafted and unique. His business could hardly be more personal -- Thistledown Puppets operates out of the basement of Hatter's home off Brambleton Avenue.

But first things first: Why "Thistledown"?

"I was listening to a lecture once, and the man said that something was 'as light as thistledown,' " said Hatter, who worked for a Salem framing shop before going to work full-time on his puppets and puppet musical earlier this year.

"It really just stuck in my head. The thistle is a serious flower, but it has this fluffy white down inside. That's the way I see my work. It's serious work, but at the same time, the characters and the stories are light-hearted and fun.

"Plus it just sounded really cool."

Oddly, Hatter is not the only person in the valley who has had success in such an unusual line of work. Salem artist and puppet maker Mary Ann Taylor has made puppets for comedian and ventriloquist Jeff Dunham and for Terry Fator, a winner of the TV show, "America's Got Talent."

The two puppet-makers have never met, Hatter said. "We don't compete and our work is quite different."

How to build a puppet

Hatter, who has a degree in art from Roanoke College, is a self-taught puppet maker. He learned, he said, from owning puppets himself and from watching videos of puppets and looking at photographs.

At some point, he said, all puppet makers eventually must find their own way. "There are no set rules," he said.

Hatter made his first puppets for shows he staged himself, including "Little Red Riding Hood." In 2007 he made three monkey puppets for a puppeteer in Canada he had met online.

Since then, orders have been trickling in, usually from people who discovered his Web site, thistledownpuppets.com. "Folks have just been finding me," he said.

For Hatter, the puppet-making process begins with finding out just what his customer wants, to eliminate problems down the road. "I make sure they tell me exactly what they're looking for, what they want it to do," he said.

Once he and the client are on the same page, Hatter sketches some ideas on a piece of paper. Then he carves a small version of the puppet out of a block of foam. Once he's satisfied with his creation, he makes a pattern from it, which he will use to create the final puppet and any future duplicates.

Hatter has already made three versions of all the barnyard animals in "Bull: A Puppet Musical," for example, and could end up making many more.

Hatter finds foam in carpet and upholstery shops, though for his finished product, he usually orders high-quality foam online. Foam can be dyed, but it tends to discolor over time, so Hatter typically covers his puppets with a dyed fabric instead.

"I had to learn all kinds of little invisible stitches," he said. Puppet hair can be made of anything, from a costume wig to sculpted foam.

Hatter's tools are mostly household-variety cutting objects -- scissors and razors and knives. Building a single puppet can take from 30 to 80 hours.

Has he ever ruined a nearly completed puppet, and had to start over from scratch?

"Yes."

A Thistledown Puppets puppet can cost anywhere from $500 to $4,000, depending partly on whether Hatter has to design it from scratch or was working for someone else's pattern.

Other factors go into it as well.

"Pricing them is a bit of an art form in itself," Hatter said.

Growing pains

Hatter has made more than 40 puppets to date, many of them self-designed. Meanwhile, there is talk of showing "Bull" at 15 additional locations in Europe and Mexico next year -- which would likely require 15 additional sets of puppets, or 60 new puppets altogether.

Should that happen, the days of Hatter's little basement workshop may be numbered, he said.

"I'm going to have to hire some people and look for a space."