Update, have begun making Rudolph to start with. It's going suprisingly well.
This photo shows my resizing the images of Rudolph to life size, then drawing overlays of the wire lengths needed as well as the armature sizes. The wool felt has a 3mm thickness so the armature needs to be that much less in all dimensions which will give me the correct size of the finished puppet. I drew in the wire armatures and the wood armatures for the head/torso and hooves.
This next photo shows my armatures that I decided to create from epoxy putty via sculpting rather than carving wood. I know the wood has less weight, but I hate carving and my dremel is blown.......LOL Each armature piece is more or less identical in size to how I drew them on the photocopy. I tested the felt by wrapping a piece around each armature piece and layed it on the drawing and it is exactly the same size as the finished puppet.