I needed a challenge and I found it.  I found the farthest thing from what I normally felt.  Livestock and North American Wildlife have been my specialty and I have always been amazed to find that the animals have a lot of similarities.  Their legs for example have the same basic shape, their udders are located where you think they should be and they have lips.  Not so with an Elephant!!  I learned many things while making this little felted pachyderm.  I found myself at the computer many times throughout the day looking up facts about elephants.

needle felted elephant

Being a farm gal I got to thinking about the baby nursing.  Sometimes we have trouble getting our baby calves or lambs to nurse right away and have to encourage them by pushing them up to the udder and giving them a taste of what they need to survive.  This isn’t always an easy job as the newborn babies seem to be pretty stupid and if the mothers aren’t cooperating it can get even more interesting.  Well . . .it would be even more interesting getting a newborn baby elephant to nurse if it couldn’t figure it out on its own.  First of all you would have to hoist that silly trunk out of the way and wrestle the baby to the udder.  What is worse I would have headed the poor baby in the wrong direction as we wouldn’t find any milk where I would normally look.  Baby elephants find their milk at the front of their mama not at the rear.

elephant

Can this be true?  Elephants purr like cats?

needle felted elephant

Maybe I learned this at some point in my early life but it amazed me just the same, as I must have forgotten.  Elephants hind legs bend backwards. Not so with the livestock around the farm.

 

I shocked my children with all sorts of Elephant facts every time they entered the room this week!

I also got to thinking about judging the elephant class at the local County Fair.  I couldn’t find any breed standards online.

 

Elephants can live around 70 years.

I enjoyed making this felted pachyderm so much!  It was a learning experience for me.  I love him, I love the look in his eyes and the puppy way he holds his head when looking at me.  I found myself saying, sorry every time I poked him with the felting needle towards the end of his sculpting.

 

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