Reclaimed Wood Moose Head Tutorial (DIY) - SimplySwider.com
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Reclaimed Wood Moose Head Tutorial (DIY)

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Jason Carter

Reclaimed Wood Moose Head Tutorial (DIY)

Update 1/3/2014: Our moose head now sits center stage in our family room on the recently refurbished fireplace in our new house. 

I am so excited about this project! It combines two hot items in home decor right now: a moose head and reclaimed wood! I was actually inspired by a Pottery Barn Kids catalog that had a reclaimed wood whale featured on one of its walls. It wasn’t even an item for sale, just a piece of art staged in the room. I fell in love with it the second I saw it, but I knew a whale wouldn’t really fit into our decor. It only took me a second to decide what shape we should use: a moose head! We’ve joked about getting a moose head for months now. Not a real one, but one of the tons of artistic renditions done of them. Even Cody was super excited when I presented this project to him (which was great since he did most of the work). Oh, and did I mention that this project was FREE? Yep, it cost us zip, zero, nada.  We had all the materials already on hand for this project although honestly, it doesn’t take much. We used some of the wood left over from the pallet picture frame project as well as some additional pieces of scrap wood lying around the garage. This project can be done using new wood as well; you’ll just have to age it first. Here’s my quick and easy tutorial for how I aged some of the pieces in this project using paint and stain:

Edage Wood

For starters you need to find an image you want to replicate. If you are artistic you could always draw your own. I simply Googled “moose head” in Google Images and searched until I found one I thought would make a good silhouette. It was surprisingly harder than I thought to find one I liked , but I finally did.  Next, Cody laid out the wood in a pattern that gave us the most variance in the wood tones. You can see the image I selected below. Cody decided to free hand the image to the wood using a pencil. If you are artistically challenged such as myself you could always have the image blown-up at Office Depot, cut it out, than trace it on to the wood.

Moose Head

Before you start cutting the wood you’ll need to attach them together with vertical pieces on the back side of the wood. Cody used a jig saw to cut out the pattern. Here’s what it looked like halfway through:

Wood Moose Head

You may have to continue to brace the pieces together by adding extra pieces to the back depending on your pattern. You can see below that the back of our moose head is not a pretty sight. Luckily, no one will see that side.

Wood Moose Head

Cody stapled a piece of leftover picture hanging wire onto the back of the moose head in order to attach it to the wall.

Wood Moose Head

And that’s it! It was actually a really easy project. I am so in love with it, and it’s actually surprisingly lighter than it looks. We originally hung it on a bare wall in the Living Room behind our front door but because we usually keep our front door open we decided it needed a more prominent spot in the house, so it’s moving into the dining room where it can be seen the second you walk into the house!

Wood Moose Head Wall

Pssst….. the family room is finally done!

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