This paper presents a novel approach to interactively edit and deform polygonal meshes. The idea is to confine editing operations to mesh regions of interest, called sub-meshes, leaving others untouched as much as possible. Classical editing operations such as scaling, shearing, and rotation can be then applied to each sub-mesh instead of the whole mesh. Analogously, intuitive deformation operations (e.g. tapering and twisting) as required for animation systems can be applied to sub-meshes, allowing the user to have control on the local deformations of mesh objects.