Handmade Wooden Toy Wooley Mammoth
Handmade Wooden Toy Wooly Mamoths |
After visiting the Florida Museum of Natural History, my grandson developed a fascination for mammoths after seeing their skeleton. He gave me marching orders that I was to make him a mammoth for his birthday. Fortunately, I had a pattern in one of John Lewman's books I had purchased. These patterns presented me with several small challenges.
The patterns were in color. I prefer simpler patterns with plain black or red lines and no shading. I find these much easier to see and to cut accurately. Some of the parts required multiples, but there was only one pattern.
The book I have was in digital format so I do not need to scan the page. I used Gimp to load the page and remove all of the color, shading and extraneous text. From there it was a simple mater to select the parts one at a time and copy and paste them into Inkscape.
Handmade Wooden Toy Wooly Mamoths |
In Inkscape traced the bit map to produce an SVG path and create the duplicates I needed. Save it and print. When I am done, I have all the patterns I needed on a single sheet of paper.
I run almost all of my patterns through Inkscape to produce SVG files for several reasons.
- I want to create a pattern that I can see and cut easily.
- I can put multiples on a single sheet of paper.
- Once the pattern is in SVG format, it is very easy to resize patterns to fit the material I have.
- The lines printed from SVG files are sharp and clear with no jagged edges.
Handmade Wooden Toy Wooly Mamoths |
The tusk overlay I made from shop made plywood. I glued three thin peices of oak together to make much better plywood than I can buy locally. I used plywood here because I was sure the tusks would break if I used solid wood.
My grandson was very happy with his new mammoths.
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