Flannel Friday: Spacesuit

I got a request this week for the file for my Spacesuit flannelboard!

I mentioned this set in another post, but never shared my file for it. Largely because it doesn’t exist!

I use cartoon and photo clip art often for my flannelboards, and I’ve gotten pretty good at editing the clip art: taking out parts I don’t want, changing the colors, altering the dimensions. But this astronaut just didn’t cooperate. I couldn’t separate the boots and gloves from the rest of the image, and I couldn’t erase the astronaut’s face from inside the helmet. And I wanted them all separate so I could talk about the different parts of the space suit one by one.

What I wound up doing was printing out the astronaut as large as I could, then enlarging him even further on the photocopier. Then I went old school with the scissors and just cut out the parts that I wanted from the rest of the image. For the gloves, I thought his right hand had better detail than his left, so I reversed the astronaut image and enlarged it both ways, so one would be right handed and one would be left handed. [Yes, this whole process was a little OCD.] Once I had all the pieces I wanted, I lay them out on cardstock and laminated them, then cut them out and put a Velcro sticky dot on the back.

So: no pretty color file. But I did make a scan of my pieces, and I also have a file of the original astronaut clip art. So you can at least have a grainy B&W image of the boots, gloves, and helmet to use as a pattern, or the clip art to print in color and enlarge on your own copiers and cut and trim yourself.

(Ed. 11/11: I am no longer sharing my clip art files due to copyright concerns, so I’ve taken down the link to the scans. However, if you search in Microsoft Word clip art you may find the original file I started with.)

My favorite thing to do with this set is to sing “If You’re Going to the Moon, Wear Your Boots” to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”

If you’re going to the moon, wear your boots
If you’re going to the moon, wear your boots
If you’re going to the moon, this is what you have to do,
If you’re going to the moon, wear your boots.

…wear your gloves
…wear your helmet