My 8yo granddaughter spends Friday nights and Saturdays with us every week. Last week she told me she wanted to start a “Savage Fox” club for her and her friends, and needed my help thinking up things for the club to do. She didn’t really like my suggestion of creating their own choreographed dance routine to “What Does the Fox Say,” but I redeemed myself by suggesting that we make her a fox mask on the Glowforge.

We found a pattern at Wintercroft that she liked, and I got started on modifying it to work on the GF. It downloads as PDF, but every PDF page is surrounded by a ton of invisible lines belonging to pieces on the other pages that have to be located and deleted, and then the text has to be converted to curves, and line colors changed so they can be separated into cut / score operations, etc…so it’s definitely not real “plug and play.” Because of that, we didn’t get to do any cutting last weekend, but she got some planning done with her neighborhood friends while I fought with it, so that was okay.

By this weekend, I had it ready to go. She painted while I cut, and we had started the glue-up when it was time to take her home. She gave me the go-ahead to finish it in her absence. Here’s the result:

Everything fits together really nicely – definitely a quality pattern, other than the issues I had with getting it into usable SVG form. We cut it from some stiff watercolor paper I had on hand (not Canson; can’t remember the brand right now), painted it with acrylics, and glued it together with rubber cement.

EDIT: Two of the pieces are marked with striped shading – turns out that’s the inside of the ears. My strategy of engraving the part numbers / colors / tab numbers on the backside of each piece kinda backfired there, because they clearly showed on the inside of the ears when all was said and done. I ended up cutting matching pieces to glue inside the ears to cover up the engraving, which had the added benefit of strengthening them, which will hopefully help them stand up to the wear and tear of being worn by an active 8yo!