Hibernation project with corks and pistachio shells

I find deer to be very pleasing to the eye, and so I don't mind decorating my house with them  throughout the year.  However, they obviously retain a seasonal value in wintertime, and with this inexpensive craft, using mostly materials you may already have lying around, you can populate your house at your leisure with overly cutesy forest friends.

This craft is loosely based on an article in a 1970s Christmas Woman's Day magazine, which I have tweaked, and which may easily be tweaked further.  It can be completed leisurely in a day's time and is not challenging for children - as long as there is a responsible person around to assist with the baking of the clay.

You will need...

5 toothpicks (per deer - 4 legs and a neck)
1 cork (per deer)
1 small packet of sculpey clay (yields 3 to 4 deer heads)
2 pistachio shells (per deer)
strong glue of your choosing
Paint
toaster oven

This was the disaster portion, in which I baked them about three hundred degrees too hot in my toaster oven and nearly burned down my house.  Most sculpey, including the Sculpey(tm) brand itself bakes at 275 degrees f for 15 minutes.  The sculpey will still be soft to the touch after the cook time, but hardens once it is cool.

I made squarish forms for the deer heads and pinched them out a bit for the noses.  I rolled out thin snakey pieces for the eyes and secured them with scoring.

Pistachios may be delicious (unless you are allergic to them) but their shells make perfect animal ears. If you press the little ears in prior to baking the sculpey, it creates a groove for them to sit in when the time comes for glueing. Also, a hole on the underside of the head should be poked in the clay while it is soft.  Poke it with the toothpick or whatever you will be using for the neck piece, and be sure the hole is relatively deep, going about halfway into the head.  Bake them without the shells in them and glue the ears on after they are cool, otherwise the ears will obviously catch on fire and disintegrate like Wile E. Coyote.

Here are the deer in process.  Having baked the clay, glued on the ears and painted the heads, the bodies assemble very easily.  You may have to play around with leg placement for best balancing results, as the heads are much heavier than the bodies. I use Japanese toothpicks, which have a flat end and are available at any Asian market or grocery store.  Four toothpicks for four legs and half a toothpick for the neck.  Stab the toothpicks right into the cork where you want them, and make sure the legs are all at an even depth.

Semi-painted deer heads

All that remains is to paint all of the pieces and glue them together.  Paint stores and big chain hardware stores such as Lowes and Home Depot have mistint paint cans in their warehouses.  Latex wall paint dries to a very professional and uniform finish.  Most of the mistints, oddly enough, tend to be permutations of beige, but after digging through the cans one can hope to find something that suits one's aesthetic - which very well may be beige.

Project complete!  To make them into fauns, all they need are dots.  Antlers wouldn't be a stretch either - one could even use smallish twigs.