Make a Turkey from Felt and a Clay Pot
November 8, 2007 by build
Filed under Crafts, Holidays, Thanksgiving
The next few posts on justbuildstuff.com are going to be about building the turkey shown in the picture below from some simple materials found at any craft store.
To get started making the turkey you need the following tools.
And the following craft supplies.
- 3″ Clay Pot
- Assorted Sheet Felt
(we used yellow, orange, brown, lt brown, black, white & green)
- 2″ Diameter Wooden Ball
- Glue On Eyes
To get started we cut the tail out of felt. First cut a brown piece as large as the entire tail and then individual feathers of the other colors. You can use the picture below as a pattern for cutting the tail and feathers, it may need to be scaled in order to be sized correctly, our tail is approximately 4.5 inches wide at the widest point.
The first thing we cut out was the base for the tail. As shown in the picture below, we just laid the pattern over the felt sheet and cut around it. Do not worry about the precision of your cuts, you can clean the pieces up after you make the initial cut.
Next cut out the feathers, from multiple colors of felt. Test lay the feathers on the tail base, and when you are satisfied with the pattern of the tail feathers glue them onto the base with a hot glue gun.
Cut the large part of the wing from the dark brown felt and the wing tip from a light brown felt, attach the wing tip with a drop of hot glue.
The feet can be cut out next. Aafter all the felt pieces are cut out they can be glued to the 3 inch clay pot as shown in the picture below.
This is the part of the project where we will create our turkey’s head. If you missed the Introduction or Part One- Cutting the Felt go back and check them out.
The first thing to add to the head is the beak cut from orange felt and hot glued in the center of the 2″ Diameter Wooden Ball
The only tasks remaining to finish this project are to glue on the head and add the turkey’s Pilgrim Hat.
Gluing on the head is simple, we just used hot glue and offset it towards the front of the pot as shown in the photo below.
The final part of the project is to make the turkey’s hat. The hat is made by taking the cardboard roll from a used up roll of toilet paper. Cut the cardboard to approximately 2 inches in length an wrap black felt around it. No cut a felt circle the same diameter as the cardboard roll with some tabs overhanging the outside of the circle. Glue this to the top of the hat by placing a drop of hot glue on each of the tabs and placing them inside the cardboard tube. Accent the the hat with a white felt stripe and a gold felt buckle and the turkey if finished and ready for a thanksgiving feast.
