Kermit Love’s career designing costumes and props for leading choreographers was overshadowed by a yellow bird standing more than 8ft tall and one of its companions, a 7ft woolly mammoth.

It was Love’s creation of Big Bird and Mr Snuffleupagus with Jim Henson for the US children’s programme Sesame Street which brought him worldwide fame rather than his critically acclaimed collaborations with such choreographers as George Balanchine and Robert Joffrey.

Sesame Street, a pioneering educational programme aimed at pre-schoolers, was second only to Britain’s Blue Peter in terms of the longest-running children’s series.

Love, who also appeared from time to time on Sesame Street as “Willy the hotdog man”, was not the inspiration for Kermit the Frog — Henson said that he did not adopt Love’s first name for his frog, which had already been so named before Love and Henson began to collaborate.

Henson made the original sketches for Big Bird, and Love brought the character to life through his designs and construction of the puppet. The two started working together in the 1960s after Love’s costume designs had caught Henson’s eye.

Love designed Big Bird, perennially aged 6, so that some feathers fell off as he moved around on his giant feet in a bid to make him more endearing. He was inspired by Henson’s own physique — he stood more than six feet (1.80m) tall — and his loping gait.

“It’s not a costume, it’s a puppet,” Love told Caroll Spinney, the man inside Big Bird who controlled the puppet using his hand in its mouth, a lever for the eyes and a TV monitor to see the stage. Spinney argued that it was “a brilliant combination of the two”.

Love believed that the puppet or costume was just the beginning; what mattered was how the character was created out of that costume.

Love became protective about his feathered creation and accompanied Big Bird on his overseas travels. He flew with Spinney to Beijing to perform a year after President Richard Nixon’s détente with Communist China because, according to Spinney, he was “very picky about the way the bird was handled”. Big Bird had his own seat but was given a half-priced ticket as he was only 6 years old.

Love helped to design Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch as well as characters for more than 20 international versions of Sesame Street. He also worked on The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movie and other spin-offs. He worked on another puppet series, The Great Space Coaster, and created the teddy bear for the Snuggle fabricsoftener commercials.

Love called all his Muppets “my children” and carried pictures of them in his wallet. He once explained: “They personify peace-loving creatures in a society that is dominantly violent.”

Kermit Ernest Hollingshead Love was born in Spring Lake, New Jersey, in 1916, the son of a decorative plasterer. He was raised by his grandmother and great-grandmother after his mother, Alice, died when he was 3.

His interest in puppets was kindled after watching a Punch and Judy show when he was 7 — “But what really inspired me even more was shadow play,” he told New York magazine in 1985. “I can remember rigging a lantern and casting shadows on the wall.”

He was thrown from a horse at 12, and severely injured his legs. The accident left him bedridden for three years with only radio plays and the drawing of what he imagined the plays’ characters looked like to amuse him.

In 1935 he started to make theatre puppets, which led to his designing costumes for the Mercury Theatre, the drama company founded by Orson Welles.

Next he collaborated with the costumier Barbara Karinska on Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo (1942) and then Jerome Robbins’s first ballet, Fancy Free, two years later. Love also worked in film and theatre, designing costumes for Broadway shows including One Touch of Venus (1943), which starred Mary Martin.

In 1946 he designed a new production for the Lido in Paris and then moved to Europe in 1950, working on films in France and Britain before returning to New York in 1962 and joining forces with Henson.

He collaborated with Balanchine for more than 40 years, their most elaborate production being Ravel’s one-act opera L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. Together they also created a 28ft (8.5m) marionette for Don Quixote (1965) and masks for Pulchinella (1972).

“Balanchine liked working with me because . . . I surprised him,” Love said. He worked on designs for the Joffrey Ballet including the ambitious restaging of Léonide Massine’s Parade with its Picasso horse (1973) and Nutcracker (1987), where he displayed an amazing attention to detail, down to each mouse with its own suit of armour. He also designed costumes for the modern-dance choreographer Twyla Tharp in the 1970s.

According to Dance Magazine, Love’s work stood out across all the genres in which he worked because “he seems to know a character’s personality and history and gives every detail a reason for being, historically as well as aesthetically”.

He is survived by his partner of 50 years, Christopher Lyall.

Kermit Love, costume designer and puppeteer, was born on August 7, 1916. He died on June 21 2008, aged 91