Surrealist puppet-making experiments

My dear PGCE tutor allowed me to run a puppet-making workshop for my fellow education students this spring. It gave me the opportunity to delve ever deeper into the issue which consumes my thoughts more than any other...how much guidance does a creative process actually require? Being tempted, for a while, to let my students create their puppets in any way they chose fit, providing the materials and basic techniques, I eventually opted for a different route.
The puppet makers wrote the initials of their name on a sheet of paper, and broke these down into single lines: straight or curved. With the initials JTH I, for example, ended up with one curved line and six straight lines.
These straight or curved lines became the puppet makers' carving 'allowance'. They could use each of these lines once in order to carve their puppet head, but no more. In this way, our puppets left familiar territory and meandered down interesting paths indeed....