Merikay’s original animals had crocheted skins, but several years ago she started experimenting with man-made fur as a covering. People seem to like these new creatures, and most of our new designs include fur, either alone or combined with crochet.

Once Merikay has built the base sculpture and added the eyes and any horns and antlers as you can read about by clicking on the links, the creative process goes differently for fur-covered animals, crocheted animals, the tied-wool buffalo, and dragons. This page describes how man-made-fur animals come to completion.

The image at right comes from the same shot as one at the end of the Eyes page, but here it has a different emphasis. Covering an animal with fur is very much a stepwise, adaptive process. For each step, Merikay selects a section of the base sculpture that is of reasonable size, doesn’t have too many different flexes in it, and doesn’t have any interior openings for antlers, horns, or eyes. She then places waxed paper on this part of the base sculpture and traces the section with a permanent marker pen, as shown in this picture.

Next she cuts out the waxed paper pattern piece. Then she places each pattern piece on a piece of man-made fur, and traces the outline, as shown at left. Next she cuts out the piece of man-made fur, and places it on the base sculpture. Sometimes a little final trimming occurs at this point, or less often the piece proves too small for the job, and Merikay has to cut a new pattern piece. Finally she applies the piece to the base sculpture with a hot glue gun.

On this picture you can see that Merikay has traced outlines of non-adjacent pieces from opposite sides of the animal, and will cut them and apply both in the same overall step. But she has learned to glue each piece onto the sculpture, before tracing and cutting an adjacent piece. Similarly, she saves the waxed paper pattern pieces from one animal to the next animal of the same kind, but these act mostly as guides to sectioning strategy, and typically she will cut new pieces for each new sculpture.

So, once all the fur sections have been cut and glued, the animal is pretty much done. Sound simple? For the Elk/Wapiti we’ve been following on preceding pages, applying the fur takes 10 to 12 hours, or more if problems arise. Click here to see the result.

If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, please send an E-mail to merikay@animalhead.com, use the contact page, sign the Guestbook, or call at 1-408-353-5037. Is this a good time?