By Ashlee Herrera

1. Strip pallets. Each turkey will need quite a few boards. About two pallets each.

2. The longest boards stripped will be the feathers. With each set of feathers dropping by only a couple inches. Decide how tall you want the tallest one and go from there. My tallest feather is about 18 inches.

3. Now draw a curve/rounded line on the top of the feather, and cut with a ban saw repeat this on all 7 feathers.

4. Next you need to get the body. It is a series of three different sized circles. You will have to pin or glue the boards together, I pinned them because it was faster. Then using a compass draw a circle on each of the boards. My circles were 14 inches, 11 inches, and 7.5 inches. Then carefully cut out the circles on the ban saw.

5. For the legs, I cut the pallet boards into 1.5-inch width and 8 inches length.

6. The feet were tricky because they have to be big enough to hold the entire turkey up. This made them much bigger than I originally wanted. They are 5 inches wide each giving the turkey a sturdy base. I cut them out of a different kind of wood. I used maple because it was easier to work with and the feet need to turn out exactly the same thickness so the turkey won’t wobble. My advice is to draw one foot and cut it out on the ban saw then trace in on the remainder of the board, then cut out the next foot.

7. For the head, I drew a circle connected to a long neck on a smaller piece of the pallet board, and used the ban saw again to cut it out.

8. The hardest part to cut out on the band saw was the beak and gobbler. I drew this on a thin scrap piece of wood. Leave the part where the gobbler attaches to the beak big enough so when you’re cutting it with the band saw it doesn’t cut it all the way off.

9. Time to assemble: start with your biggest circle and your feathers, lay the circle face down and staple the feathers on the back. Once finished turn over and staple medium sized circle to the front, staple the small circle onto the medium circle and do the same with the head then beak. Also before stapling I used a little wood glue to hold each piece a little better, don’t use to much. You don’t want it to come out the sides.  Now the body of your turkey is assembled, time to make him stand-up. Take the feet and screw them to legs from the bottom of the foot. Then trace where on the body you want them to get screwed on. Use two screws per leg to make sure they hold well. I let him sit and dry for 24 hours.

10. The next day I put acrylic paint in cups and watered it down. This is only meant to be a color wash it won’t be so solid you can’t see the wood. I used orange, yellow, and red because those are my favorite fall colors, but feel free to put your own spin on it. Let the wash dry and then put on some eyes, For this I just used a sharpie.

11. Enjoy your turkey and let it be a reminder to be thankful this season.