It’s no secret I like to make door decorations. Flowers. Owls. Wreaths.
So with Thanksgiving coming up, I bet you can guess what I made this weekend.
Yup, a turkey for my door 🙂 .
I started this one the way I always do, looking at clip art and craft ideas and noting what makes an image “work.” And then I drew up my own mashup, keeping in mind the sizing I have to work with (12 x 12 paper in particular).
I like to draw the finished image first, colored in vaguely like it’s going to be.
That gives me a guide for my project as I get deeper into it, since sometimes I get completely off track and forget what the little yellow rectangles are for. (Oh yeah, buckles for the turkey shoes! Right!)
Then I break apart the image to separate the pieces by the color they need to be cut on.
I found a neat burlap digital print texture online, and the colors were perfect for this project so I printed off several sheets.
I exported my design files as DXF, because I like to work in Adobe Illustrator (I have more than 25 years invested in that), but the basic version of Silhouette Studio won’t accept an AI or EPS file. But DXF files are perfect.
After I cut the various pieces, I traced the turkey body onto a cereal box and cut that with scissors to create a stable background. I don’t like to use my Silhouette to cut cereal boxes because it’s rough on the blades, and since this part won’t show, it isn’t worth wasting them. I also cut a few circles (I used a juice glass as a template) for gluing down the feathers. On the turkey body piece, I left an extra bit of cereal box at the top to hide under the pilgrim hat to reinforce the hanging hole.
Quick drying tacky glue and staples were what I used to put the various pieces together. I created the feather rounds first, and then stapled them to the cereal box back. I glued up all the turkey details onto the turkey body, and then glued that on top of the cereal box, which hid the staples. Finally I added the hat and punched a hole in it for hanging.
Once it was on the door, Mr. SuzerSpace (who is an editor by trade) noticed the background feather colors were too close to the door color. So I freehanded a white background cut a little bigger than the turkey and hung that on the same hook so it has something to stand out against.
