Hannibal and His Elephants - Elephant Carving

This week in our Tapestry of Grace Unit, we have been studying about Hannibal and the elephants that he attempted to take across the Pyrenees and Alps Mountains to Italy in an attempt to conquor Rome. This was the second Punic War. He began his journey in Carthage with an estimated 30 elephants and 60,000 men. By the time he got to northern Italy, he had lost more than half of his men and only had one elephant left. Cold weather and small tribal attacks depleated his army.

I thought it would be fun to carve elephants out of soap. We used Ivory, cheap and gentle. We have a wonderful book called Pioneer Crafts by Barbara Greenwood and Heather Collins that have really good instructions and pictures for soap carving. There are other great things in thsi book as well.

For cutting instruments, I had several 'dull' sharp knives that we had bought at the dollar store years ago. They were sharp enough to cut the soap, but not a finger. Case knives would also work well.

The picture that we were looking at and using as a model is here.

I just used google images 'elephant carving' and picked the best one for us.

Here is what we got when we were finished.

Just a bit of a warning, this is a messy project, but we all had a great time, lots of fun! The children even used some leftover soap bars to make some other things with their creativity. Dear daughter made a camera (she is camera happy these days) and they are currently in the bathtubs putting all the shavings to good use.

Blessings for a fun and wonderful art project at your house today. Suzie