Antron fleeceFleece is the knit fabric used as the outer skin on most mod... More is the nylon fleece that became the standard skin material for Muppet-style puppets — and, strictly speaking, it has not been manufactured since 2006.
The name survives anyway, which causes constant confusion for new builders trying to buy it.
The history
The original fabricFabric is the outer surface of a puppet — the skin, the cl... More was a nylon fleece built on DuPont’s Antron fibre, developed as apparel material with no puppet marketing behind it at all. The Jim Henson CompanyThe Jim Henson Company is the production company founded by ... found it at a textiles trade show in the 1970s and ordered it in Miss Piggy pink and Kermit green, and word spread through the puppet building community from there. When the original fibre blend became scarce, a non-branded substitute was used instead — the resulting fabric was effectively identical, and builders kept calling it Antron.
What it actually is now
Production of the original ended around 2006 when the yarn it was knit from was discontinued. Today the material sold in that lineage is NylafleeceNylafleece is the nylon puppet fleece sold today as the dire..., a nylon puppet fleece with the dense pile, four-way stretch and seam-hiding behaviour builders want. Polyester alternatives are also in wide use.
Why builders care
The dense nylon pile closes over a stitch line and hides it in a way ordinary polar fleece can’t. That is the whole appeal.
Buy honestly
If you sell puppets, name the material you actually used. Calling a Nylafleece build “Antron” isn’t a shortcut — it is inaccurate, and this is a small community that notices.
What to buy instead
Nylafleece is the direct descendant and the closest thing to the original. Fuzzelle is a common alternative with a slightly different hand. And ordinary polar fleece from a craft store will build a perfectly good puppet — it simply shows a seam that nylon fleece would swallow, so plan your seam placement around that rather than fighting it.