I recently saw a neat camel pattern in one of the scroll sawing magazines.  I won't re-print the pattern here, because pattern authors get upset if you share their patterns. However, if you Google Image search for camel scroll saw, you will find many free patterns for camels.  You can probably also google Judy Peterson, and she probably has a web site where she sells patterns.

This pattern is supposed to have large pieces, so no danger of choking..........and a 2-year old is supposed to be able to figure it out.  Since my grandson will be 2 in a few months, I made one for him.

Last year I made a lot of David Wakefield's wood animated toys.  I used cherry on those projects, dipped in a couple of coats of mineral oil.  I decided to use cherry wood on this project.

My cherry wood was not wide enough of a board to include the whole camel.  I decided to make the head from another piece of cherry. The issue with this, is that you will not automatically get a piece that mates perfectly with the other piece.  I ended up doing some hand filing, until I could force the pieces together in the vise without breaking them.  I took the 2 pieces to the scroll saw and re-sawed the mating edges, which worked great.

I decided to use cherry stain on this puzzle, followed by mineral oil. I dried the stained pieces in the oven at 120F for about 10 minutes, before dipping them in mineral oil, which worked ok.

Since you are scroll sawing 3/4" cherry, and you want loose fitting joints, one should use a large size blade........versus the small blades used for very thin stock.

I glued the paper pattern onto the cherry using white Elmer's glue.  After sawing, I used a wet dish rag to rub off the excess paper and glue.

My lowest cost source of 1 gallon of mineral oil is my Bloomington Farm & Fleet store.  They sell it in the animal section (not the paint section), because it is still used as a laxative for cows!

This was a fun little project.  It only took a couple of hours to scroll saw, sand, stain, and dip in Mineral Oil.  Now I am ready to see if my 2-year old grandson can figure out!

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