Big Bird had his own seat, Mr. Spinney said, adding, “They gave us a half-priced ticket because he was only 6 years old.”  Mr. Henson, a co-creator of “Sesame Street,” characters, who died in 1990, did the original sketches of Big Bird. Mr. Love built the bird, with its manhole-sized orange foam feet. He added feathers (with some designed to fall off) to make the creature cuter. Inside, Mr. Spinney controlled Big Bird’s mouth with his hand and the eyes with a lever attached to his pinky finger. A television monitor was later placed inside the puppet to allow Mr. Spinney to see the set.  Mr. Love, who, with his Santa Claus-like beard played Willy the Hot Dog Man on the show, also helped design Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster; he insisted he was not the namesake of the famous frog. He created characters for 22 foreign versions of “Sesame Street.”  It was Mr. Love’s work fashioning costumes and masks for dance that brought him to the attention of Mr. Henson. He had also worked in film and theater, including doing costumes for Broadway shows like “One Touch of Venus” in 1943 with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ogden Nash; Mary Martin was the star.  A 1998 Dance magazine profile of Mr. Love said, “Regardless of the genre in which he works, each of his costumes is special because he seems to know a character’s personality and history and gives every detail a reason for being, historically as well as aesthetically.”  Mr. Love worked on . de Mille’s “Rodeo” in 1942 and, two years later, on Robbins’s first ballet, “Fancy Free.”  Mr. Love worked with Balanchine for more than 40 years. In 1965, he built the 28-foot-high marionette for the Balanchine production of “Don Quixote.” A decade later, they collaborated on “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges” (“The Spellbound Child”), a one-act opera that tells the tale of a bratty boy who tears up his house and tortures his cat and squirrel, but is then taught lessons by objects that come to life. For the 1981 television production of the work, Mr. Love created settings and costumes, including dancing chairs, a clock that spins away from a wall and life-size owls, frogs and dragonflies that flutter about the boy.  For the Joffrey Ballet’s “Nutcracker,” Mr. Love dressed the mice in suits of armor.  How many “Nutcrackers” had he done? “Oh God, so many ‘Nutcrackers,’ ” he once said.  Despite his assumed English (and sometimes French) accent, Kermit Ernest Hollingshead Love was born in Spring Lake, N.J., on Aug. 7, 1916. His father, Ernest Love, was a decorative plasterer. His mother, Alice, died when he was 3, and he was raised by a grandmother and a great-grandmother.  Young Kermit was first fascinated with Punch-and-Judy puppets at 7. “But what 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.” Thrown by a horse at 12, he suffered serious damage to both legs. Bedridden for three years, he listened to radio dramas and drew pictures of what he imagined the characters looked like.  Mr. Love began making puppets for a federal Works Progress Administration theater in 1935 and soon after was designing costumes for Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater. Then he began working with Barbara Karinska, the costumer for the New York City Ballet.  Mr. Love is survived by Mr. Lyall.  Like a doting father, Mr. Love worried about Big Bird. In 1985, the two rode the Metroliner to Washington for the Easter Egg roll on the White House lawn.  “The grass stained his feet,” Mr. Love complained to New York magazine. “He had to have his soles replaced.”  An obituary on Tuesday about Kermit Love, a costume designer and a creator, with Jim Henson, of “Sesame Street” characters including Big Bird, misstated Mr. Henson’s role in starting “Sesame Street.” The show was created by a team put together by the Children’s Television Workshop, now called Sesame Workshop; Mr. Henson was not the creator.  An obituary on June 24 about Kermit Love, a costume designer and co-creator of “Sesame Street” characters including Big Bird, referred incorrectly to the television monitor Mr. Love placed inside the Big Bird costume so the operator could see the program’s set. The monitor was installed after the initial use of the figure; it was not part of the original design.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C11 of the New York edition with the headline: Kermit Love, Costume Creator, Dies at 91. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Love was the costume designer for some of ballet’s most renowned choreographers, but his greatest fame came from the beloved “Sesame Street” characters Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus.