Beginning to Create the Next Carousel Animal - A Ram

 Regular readers know that I have been working on two long-term projects at once.  This helps me to from getting burned out on either project.  Making the animals for the carousel in paper mâché is somewhat repetitive in some segments so I need to break it up.  I had reached a good stopping point on the Green Man Pumpkin Project, and now I am ready to work on the next paper mâché animal on the carousel project.  This animal is going to be a Ram.  

This is my second carousel.  The first one was very small.  The base of the carousel was only about six inches in diameter.  The animals were only a couple on inches in length.  This time I am trying to make a carousel where the animals are about four to six inches long.  I have not worked out the size for the base yet.  I will have to see what works with the animals I am making.  Why work so small?  The main answer is that a carousel can take up a significant amount of space.  Very few people have the space for a large craft item these days.  I certainly don't. My house is already covered with many of my creations.  I keep them until I grow tired of them, then they are sold, but I really need to do more about getting them out the door.

So on with the first session of the Ram.  I debated about the horns on the animal.  Some goats have small horns, others have great curling horns, and yet others have longer straight horns.  I finally decided on curling ram horns, but I am going to leave working on the horns for later in the project and just have small jutting horns on the head for proper placement.  The horns would be in the way during much of the project.

First, I needed a pattern, and I turned to my book on carving carousel animals.  That is when things got a

little weird.  The table of contents said there was a pattern, but that part of the book seemed to have been omitted.  I looked in my other book on carving carousel animals and it had a goat pattern.  I decided to use that as a starting point.  I modified the pattern for the legs.  I turned it from walking to having all four legs off the ground as if it were leaping.  I also modified the face area.  The pattern had an open mouth.  It was changed to a closed mouth. Making those teeth would have been difficult.  I am working so small that it would be too hard to do that in paper mâché.

Once the pattern modifications were complete, I transferred the pattern to some cardstock.  You don't have to use cardstock, it could be a cereal box, file folder, or some other type of thin cardboard.  I just happen to have an abundance of blue cardstock.  

I cut out four pieces of the pattern.  Two of the pieces have toothpicks glued to it with hot glue to make the cardstock a little less flexible.  Then the other two pieces were placed on top of the pieces to cover the toothpicks.  I used hot glue, working on small sections at a time and making sure that all of the pieces were aligned properly.

Today I am in a real time crunch.  I will post more about how the animal becomes three dimensional in the post next week.