Free turkey SVG files

How the fan-tailed turkeys hold together

A turkey seen from the front is a body standing in front of its own tail, which a single colour cannot show. In these files a thin gap, about 1.5 mm wide when the bird is 100 mm across, runs round the head and shoulders where they cross the tail. The gap stops at the wings, so the body stays joined to the feathers and the whole bird lifts off the mat in one piece.

The eyes, the beak and the wattle are holes. Cut the bird from brown card or vinyl and put a scrap of orange behind the beak and red behind the wattle, or leave them open on a pale surface. The legs and toes are the thinnest solid parts, between 2 and 3 mm wide at 100 mm, so in wood or acrylic cut the birds at 150 mm or more, or choose the turkey silhouette.

Feathers in more than one colour

For a tail in autumn colours, cut the turkey body without feathers once and the turkey feather several times in red, orange, yellow and brown, then fan the feathers out behind the body and glue them at the quills. At 100 mm tall the feather is about 30 mm wide, so five to seven of them make a full tail for a body cut at the same height. Children can use hand prints or pressed leaves for the feathers instead.

How to open the files

• Cricut Design Space: choose Upload, pick the SVG, and add it to the canvas. Set the width you want; the shape is already welded.
• Silhouette Studio: Designer Edition and above open the SVG. The free Basic Edition does not, so open the DXF instead.
• LightBurn, xTool Creative Space and Glowforge: import the SVG, then set the layer to cut, score or engrave.
• Inkscape, Illustrator and Affinity: open the SVG. It is a plain filled path, so you can recolour it, add a stroke or combine it with your own work.
• Printing or sublimation: use the PNG, which has a transparent background.

Each design page lists the file’s narrowest part at seven sizes, so you can tell whether it will survive at the size you plan to cut.

Questions