Quilled sheep for Agricola board game

When a colleague of my husband saw my blog, he asked if I could create miniature sheep figures for him. It turned out that he's an Agricola game fan. For this board game you need sheep among other things. Besides the game itself, its fans value handmade pieces for it. The animals have to be tiny, approximately 3/8" x 3/8" (1 x 1 cm) in size. Most of the Agricola animals found on the Web are made of polymer clay (FIMO, for instance).

I created a prototype sheep with three-dimensional quilling and, after it was shown to the colleague, was requested to make twelve more. For the game you need 20 sheep, but usually not all of them are in use at the same time, so 12 would suffice. I must admit that making such a small figures is very tricky, so it was decided that 5/8" x 5/8" (1.5 x 1.5 cm) would be good enough. He also wanted each sheep to have an individuality, its unique look and expression. Choice of colors was up to me.

A single sheep takes more than an hour to make. And as each one had to be unique I couldn't prepare stock parts to assemble them later, so each sheep was made independently. I used home-cut paper strips 1/8" and 1/16" in width (3 mm and 1.5 mm). The sheep are coated with Grumbacher spray picture and oil painting varnish (matte), which I used also on some other occasions.

Well, here are the sheep I came up with. Not sure about the customer, but I was very pleased with them. If you are an Agricola fan, and you liked my quilled sheep — drop me a line :)