Tangram Giraffes

As you know Tyler and I love Mad Men. Tyler commented on several occasions that he loved the "tangram giraffes" in Pete's apartment on the show so I decided to recreate them for him for Christmas a few years ago.

I found this picture online and duplicated in in illustrator, tweaked it (the Mad Men version has the cat's ears separate from the head) and created a template to print out.

I taped the template to a piece of wood to figure out how big I wanted it.

Here is some of the final template printed out and cut apart. It was very important to label the pieces as they all looked like random shapes at this point.


We bought a giant piece of wood and traced the template pieces on it. Luckily my Dad is good with a saw- there is no way I could have done this!



I read online that the background was made of burlap so we bought a roll and doubled it up so you couldn't see through it. We cut the back panels out and this picture shows the wooden pieces wooden background. The giraffe on the right has the burlap under it.



Next we spent a lot of time spray painting. I didn't come up with this idea to make these until a few weeks before Christmas so we had to work in my dad's tool room in the basement because it was always snowing... We bought some long, skinny pieces of wood to make the frames and painted them black as well.


We used guerilla glue to adhere the animals onto the background. We had to make sure we used enough to seep through the burlap onto the wood but not too much because it would squeeze out. This picture is how we kept enough pressure on them to make sure the pieces wound't come off.




Here is the finish product at our old house (I do not miss that place!) on Christmas morning.


Then we got our new house and I knew they would be perfect- there are already a lot of asian influences in it.  The giraffes and cat have been hanging out in our dining room for the last 6 months until last night when Tyler hung them up in the entrance (just like at Pete's) before our Mad Men party.

I also went through my records yesterday and hid all the ones after 1965 to make our Mad Men party more authentic but my shelves are looking a little bare...


I'll have to take some more pictures during the day since these are all dark and crappy. I was just so excited they made it on the wall!

Here is a close up on the cat's head. They aren't perfect (my dad wanted to redo them before Christmas and I said he was crazy!) and they are a little bigger than Pete's, but I love them!