Putting the Scarecrow Together

Crystal Allison: I am Crystal Allison from Colvin Run Mill Historic Site and today we're building a basic scarecrow and we're at the final step to building our scarecrow. I'm going to take the upper body and put it with the lower body and the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to take the shirt tail of the shirt and tuck it as far in to the pants as I can get it. Its important to tuck the shirt in as far as you can so that your scarecrow wont have an accident and fall apart. Once you've completed that, now you might want to look at your scarecrow, does he seem a little on the thin side? Well, if thats the case, which I think mine is, unbutton the shirt and grab some hay and again try to put it in length wise of the body so that your body will be as stiff as possible and I'm going to continue doing this until I have a body shape that I desire for my scarecrow. When you're happy with how full your scarecrow is, or has a desired body shape, then you need to re-button the shirt of the scarecrow. Remember to tuck the front of the shirt in as far as it will go in to the pants of your scarecrow. Now, I'm going to fasten the pants of my scarecrow and I'm ready to tie some pieces of twine onto the belt loops of my scarecrow. These pieces of twine are about a yard long and they're going to become the suspenders for my scarecrow and these suspenders will hold my scarecrow together so that the bottom half does not come away from the top half. I tied the twine to the front two belt loops. Now, I'm going to gently turn my scarecrow over because I dont want him to fall apart at this point, I'm going to find my twine and then I'm going to tie it to the back belt loop and at this point you might want to either tie it to the middle belt loop or if your string is long enough to cross your suspenders in the back. Then you want to put some pressure on this because you do want your scarecrow to stay together and to remember that the twine will stretch some as the days go on and you have this outside. Now, you have a basic scarecrow.