What to do with those scraps

I have a lot of scraps. You know, the cut ends of wood that you end up kicking around the floor. Mine were piling up and they made me kind of sad.

Heck, I sell under the name, The Reclaimed Life, so I had to give them another purpose.

I took some random discarded pieces of pallet wood to make this lovely doggie:

I used some old weathered scraps to make this fun fishy:

I love this moose and I'm keeping him all to myself:

Kind of seeing a theme here?!? Well, I do live in New Hampshire where we love our dogs, fish and moose. And it wouldn't be New Hampshire without a bear or two:

I used much smaller scraps to make these bears.

You can make your own "scrap animal" too. I stayed with my New England theme, but you can choose any animal, or object, you like. Stay with a silhouette you would find easy to cut with a jigsaw.

I used my Silhouette Cameo program, but you can just put the outline of your object in photo editing software or a word processing document, enlarge to the size you want, print out the multiple "puzzle" sheets and tape it together.

After you have cut around your template, trace it onto 1/4" plywood wood, then cut out your object with a jigsaw.

Of course, I forgot to take more "during" photos. But the rest is really easy. Here's what you need to remember: after you adhere your wood scraps, you will cut around your template again. So you want to go past the edges when you glue the scraps to the 1/4" plywood. Now just lay your small scraps across the wood, going over the edge of your cutout. I like to vary the color and length. Adhere the pieces with wood glue as you go along. When I finished gluing all my pieces, you couldn't even tell it was a bear -- it just looked like a mess of wood.

After the glue dried, I flipped the bear over and put 1/2" staples in the back to make sure the wood scraps weren't going anywhere. I kept the bear on it's back and cut around the wood template again. This "shaved" off the ends of the scraps that were overhanging. And that's it! Just add a hanger and you're good to go.