Papercraft World Fox & Bear

Our family recently received review copies of two new art kits Timberdoodle added to their catalog this year: Papercraft World Fox and Papercraft World Bear.

Each kit contains enough materials to make one animal, plus very brief instructions. The only other thing you’ll need is a bottle of glue. And a little patience. (Plus — if you’re as old as I am — a strong pair of reading glasses).

Also included in each kit is a bonus beginner project: a small, red, origami heart. This little heart allows you to get some practice folding and gluing the pieces together before tackling the larger, more intricate project. (Gabriel added a loop of golden string to his finished heart and turned it into a Christmas ornament.)

Papercraft World Fox

Then he tackled the Papercraft World Fox.

This is no 10-minute craft project that is over as soon as you start. As you might be able to tell from all the different shirts Gabriel is wearing in these pictures, it took him the better part of a week to complete this project.

Part of that is due to the fact you must hold the pieces together until the glue is dry enough to move on. That’s why we decided to use tacky glue. It dries faster and is perfect for paper crafting.

The fox was especially satisfying to build. It has a beautiful variety of shapes: long narrow parts like the slender legs, softly rounded parts like the chest and the tail, and sharper pointed parts such as the ears and the nose.

It’s also very colorful, with its dark legs, orange body, and white chest and ears. We all enjoyed seeing it come together over the course of the week Gabriel spent making it.

And he enjoyed the process, too. He’d take a break from his studies long enough to glue a few pieces together. Then he’d hit the books again while they dried.

He’d also work on it in the afternoons and evenings while Mom or Dad read aloud to the familly.

By the end of the week, he had something truly beautiful to show for his efforts. Bonus: He finished the project just in time to enter it into the Creative Arts Competition at the East Texas State Fair. (He won first place on it. He also won a blue ribbon on his origami heart Christmas ornament. So, two prizes for the price of one!)

Papercraft World Bear

While Gabriel was putting together the Papercraft World Fox, my daughter Rachel started building the Papercraft World Bear.

No, those aren’t her hands in the photo above. They’re mine. Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of her folding and gluing the bear’s face, which is all she finished before our summer break was over. After that, she got super busy with working a part-time job while attending and studying for her college classes.

So as not to delay this review any longer (and because I was eager to try building one of these papercraft creatures myself), I finished gluing the bear together.

Unfortunately, I did not do as nearly a precise job on the part I constructed as Rachel had done on hers. Every piece of the face lined up perfectly for her. Mine had tiny gaps and didn’t fit quite as well as I’d hoped.

It was only later (once the sun came up) that I discovered why. As it turns out, there are tiny little numbers on each flap that clue you in to how each piece should be positioned properly. In the poor lighting of our new home, I didn’t even notice those numbers until I was halfway finished with the bear. The reason a few of my pieces didn’t seem to match up? Because they were never intended to match up. Ha!

No worries, though. There was enough scrap paper left over that I could cut and fold a couple of extra triangles to fill in the gaps. That more than made up for my mistake in the end. Overall, I’m pretty proud of how my project turned out. Sure, it isn’t as flashy or fancy as the fox, but it was obviously all I could handle. The pictures don’t really do either justice, but both these World Papercraft animals were lots of fun to make.

If you’d like to give either a go yourself (or surprise an older child for Christmas or birthdays with this project), you can order from Timberdoodle. The Papercraft World Fox and Papercraft World Bear are sold separately. You’ll also find the bear in in Timberdoodle’s Eleventh Grade Curriculum Kit and the fox in their Twelfth Grade Kit.

More from Timberdoodle

While you’re on the Timberdoodle website, I’d encourage you to look around. We love everything we’ve ever ordered from this small family-owned company!

Be sure to sign up for their Doodle Dollar program to save on future purchases. And to read more of my Timberdoodle Reviews, follow this link.

PLEASE NOTE: As a member of the Timberdoodle blog team, I routinely receive free or deeply discounted products in exchange for writing honest reviews. Opinions expressed in these posts are 100% my own. I’ve been a happy and enthusiastic Timberdoodle customer for decades — long before I ever started blogging for their company.