Breakfast Board - An Unconventional Start to the Day

If you love playing with your food, or like the idea of combinding food with toys, this is a pretty cool project to make. You can make it in pretty much any shape you want. We chose an owl because it's cute and has the general shape we wanted. You can make other animals like fish, pigs, rabbits, pikachus, etc; objects like cars, castles, other food; or beasties that only you could possibly imagine.


The Inspiration:
My wife found a company called Nova Naturals that has lots of incredibly cool children's toys. One of the products they carry is called a "breakfast board". According to their description it's a common practice in Germany for children to eat their breakfast on shaped boards instead of a "typical" plate. As a new parent and a DIYer I of course looked at it and thought, "We could make that". So we did. We decided to make all of the gifts we gave our son this past Christmas and this was one of them. You can make them for your own kids or give them as gifts to children you know.


Note:
I have tried to document this project with plenty of progress shots, but I don't have shots of me doing any of the steps. Sorry, I don't have three arms like Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Step 1 Supplies

You will need:

-Paper (For sketching designs. You can skip this and just draw right on the wood but I prefer to prepare ahead of time.)
-Pencil (Also for sketching, and for drawing your design on the board.)
-Wood, preferrably in board form (I really have no idea what kind of wood I used, but you want to make sure it's not treated with any chemicals. Remember, your child or possibly you will be eating off of this and you don't want any gross things leaching into your food.)
-Band saw (This isn't strictly necessary, but it makes things go a LOT faster.)
-Coping saw (For getting in all of the nooks and crannies.)
-Wood rasp and files
-Sand paper
-Wood burner (I guess this one isn't strictly necessary either, but it's the way we did it.)
-Food safe wood sealer


If you get to the end of this instructable and think you could do it better with different tools, feel free. This is how I did it, but I am in no way a professional so do it with whatever tools you're comfortable.