Here's how to make an OAuth1-signed request to the Twitter API with the requests library.

twitter_request_example.py

# Run on the command line like so:
# $ python your_consumer_key your_consumer_secret your_access_token your_token_secret
import requests
from requests.auth import OAuth1

import sys

consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token, token_secret = \
  	[unicode(x) for x in sys.argv[1:]]

# signature type "query" for GET requests
oauth = OAuth1(consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token, token_secret,
		signature_type="query")
resp = requests.get('https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/home_timeline.json',
		auth=oauth)
print resp.status_code
print resp.headers
print resp.json

# signature type "body" for POST requests
oauth = OAuth1(consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token, token_secret,
		signature_type="body")
resp = requests.post('https://api.twitter.com/1.1/favorites/create.json',
		auth=oauth, data={'id': '268913321816780801'})
print resp.status_code
print resp.headers
print resp.json

n.b. this is out of date, now that the OAuth1 thingy isn't included with requests any more. should be able to adapt this to use https://github.com/requests/requests-oauthlib without many changes, though.