Supplies:

1. Wood or other median you want your animals to be on. You could put them on a shirt, a card, a car decal, and much more.
2. Glowforge, Cricut (any of the Cricut machines will work), or similar machines depending how you want to make the designs.
3. My design, which can be found in my shop or in my Etsy shop.
4. Infusible ink sheets, infusible ink markers (and laser copy paper), and/or HTV/iron on vinyl.
5. Glue, glue dots, and/or a heat press

Steps:

1. Determine which animals and accessories you would like to use and how you would like to make them/which materials.
2. Make sure they are all sized to your liking. I made all the animals fit all the accessories without needing to be resized, however if you resize an animal, then you will need to resize the accessories accordingly. I like to add the accessories to the animal, then I select both and size them together.
3. If you would like to engrave on the wood square, then these are the settings I used: Speed 800, power 80, lines per inch for darker engraving 195, and lines per inch for lighter engraving 170.
4. For infusible ink markers:
   1. Have your Cricut machine drawl the outline of the animal. Change the operations setting to pen. This can be found in the upper left hand side of the page.
   1. Make sure you mirror your design especially if you add any words to the design.
   1. Place a piece of laser copy paper on a blue light grip cutting mat.  
   1. After your Cricut machine drawls your animal outline you can go back and add more color and fill it in.
   1. Once you are done coloring in your animal, place it on your piece of wood or material you would like to place it on. For wood I heated it at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 seconds. Do not forget to put butcher paper over your design so the infusible ink does not bleed onto your heat source. You should use heat resistant tape to help keep the copy paper in place while being heated. If it moves, it will cause a ghosting affect. Then peel it off once it is cool.
   1. Lastly you can add the accessories in the materials you wish. I like mixing materials, so the accessories stand out more.
5. For HTV/iron:
   1. Make sure to mirror your design especially if you add words to it.
   1. Place your material shiny design side down. Note this is for Cricut brand HTV. Some other brands are different, and you will need to follow the instructions on the label.
   1. Select the material you are using and I like to change my pressure to more.
   1. Before unloading your material make sure your cuts are good. It should cut all the way through the vinyl, but not the clear carrier sheet. If it did not, then you can hit the go button again, but only if you did not unload the material already.
   1. Weed out any of the unwanted vinyl.
   1. Pre heat your wood for 5 seconds. Then place your design on your wood accordingly. I like to place a protective sheet, like a teflon sheet over my design for protection. I set my heat press to 300 degrees Fahrenheit for 40 seconds. You can always heat your HTV more if it has not completely adhered to the wood yet.
   1. Set it aside to cool before removing the carrier sheet. In my video I got excited with my first one and peeled it while it was still hot, and my HTV started to wrinkle a little. I was able to smooth it out with my fingers, but this is while you should peel it once it has cooled. The wood does cool pretty quickly.
6. For my wood and acrylic accessories I cut on my Gloforge, I applied sticky dots (double sided tape) to the back of them so they could be removed easily and switched out for other accessories. If you would like these accessories to be more permanent, then you could glue them down.

I really like being able to change out the different accessories. Changing the accessories really changes the entire look of the animal. This project was a lot of fun to make. You could cut the wood squares down to fit inside the little box frames from Michaels. I also used this little piece of wood from Michael’s like a wardrobe to store my extra accessories. You could also place them on little stands or lean them up against something in a tier tray. You could also make these for different holidays and make other designs besides my animals. I love all the possibilities there are with these. You can mix and match so many different materials, and even when you have everything made, you can continue to change them up. I think my favorite is the giraffe and the cat with the bowtie. Which animal or combination is your favorite?