Craft and Hobby Site

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It won’t be long before people all over Canada and the United States will be celebrating Thanksgiving, the second Monday in October for those in Canada and the fourth Thursday of November in the US. Now is the time to think about home-made Thanksgiving centerpieces you can make.

An obvious choice for a home-made Thanksgiving centerpiece is to use the traditional decoration – the cornucopia. While you may not want to create your cornucopia out of a hollowed-out goat’s horn, you can go to your local craft store and find baskets that are shaped like a cornucopia. Use real gourds, fruits, nuts, and greenery to have spilling out of the horn, or use silk and plastic items. If you choose to use silk and sugared plastic items, they can be stored and reused each year. Place the basket on a mirror with candles around it to help illuminate your harvest table.

Many people associate the pilgrim’s hat with Thanksgiving. You can create a pilgrim hat out of terracotta pot, black felt, and some yellow paper. Determine the size of the brim by rolling the terracotta pot in a circle, marking the top and the bottom until you get a complete circle. Cut out the shape on both lines, and cover the pot and brim with black felt. Cut out a buckle out of the yellow paper. Glue the buckle on the covered pot. After the glue has dried, put a potted flower inside and place it in the center of your table.

Create a harvest wreath to use as a centerpiece. Find about 20 feet of Virginia creeper or grape vine for your base. Wrap the vine into a circle small enough to allow you to place plates around it, probably around 10 inches in diameter. After the base has been made, you can add small pumpkins, gourds, or fall flowers in it to give it color.

To get the children in the family involved in the decorations, let them create a Thanksgiving turkey out of a large paper grocery sack. Gather colorful fall leaves to use as the tail of the turkey. Fill the bag with crumpled newspaper and tie it off with rubber band to create the head. Draw on wings. Create a waddle and legs from construction paper. Glue the leaves on the flat part of the bag as tail feathers. Glue the waddle and legs where they belong. Don’t forget to give your turkey eyes.

Thanksgiving is a great holiday to enjoy with family and friends. No matter how you decorate the table and what you use as a home-made Thanksgiving centerpiece, be sure to leave room for the most important item on your table – the turkey and fixings. Your guests may appreciate the decorating effort but they’ll appreciate a great meal more.

Turkeys are popular at Thanksgiving time, both as the main dish and as decorations. There are many different ways to create nice turkey that may become a tradition for decorating for years to come.

The simplest turkey to make is by tracing around a hand, fingers spread. The thumb becomes the head, the other fingers the feathers and the palm is the body of the turkey. Color the turkey, add details like eyes and cut it out. They can be hung on the walls, scattered around the table or used to create a mobile.

Another fun project is a paper mache’ turkey. Prepare the paper mache’ paste. The two most popular methods are:

1. Non-cooked – 3 part white glue to 1 part water
2. Cooked – 1 part flour to 5 parts water, boil about 3 minutes and let cool

Blow up a large balloon and cover with newspaper strips that have been covered in the paste. Once dry, prime the body and paint brown. Cut out colorful feathers, feet, and a head and attach them to the turkey body.

If you don’t want the mess of a paper mache’ turkey, you can make one out of a paper bag. Stuff the bag with newspaper or plastic bags and shape the body. You can decorate it like the paper mache’ turkey, with feathers, feet and a head.

Another turkey craft that could also be used for a game is to make 2-liter bottle turkeys. Put a little bit of sand in the bottom to keep them from falling over. Paint the bottles brown and then decorate them. After you have ten of them, you could let the kids go bowling for turkeys.

If you have a pine tree, as well as other trees that have beautiful fall foliage, in your back yard, you have the makings of a completely free turkey craft. Gather the items from your yard, arrange the leaves on a piece of paper in a fan shape, to look like the turkey’s tail feathers. Glue the pinecone at the base for the body. Add google-eyes, or cut out construction paper eyes, feet and beak and you have an adorable turkey right from your own yard.

To create a turkey wreath, cut out a circle of cardboard with the center cut out, leaving about a two-inch ring. Cut strips of red, orange and yellow construction paper an inch wide by about 4 inches long. Glue the ends together to create rings, and arrange them on the wreath for the feathers. Cut out a head and feet and attach at the bottom of the wreath.

With some imagination and a few simple supplies, you can create not only nice decorations for your Thanksgiving celebration, but memories too. Spending the time with your children to make a few turkeys will be remembered long after the pie and stuffing are all gone.

Kids love making a mess and being creative. What better way to keep them busy while they are waiting for Thanksgiving dinner, then to create some one-of-a-kind decorations for the dinner table? Provide the kids with some paper, glue, scissors, crayons, and other craft supplies, such as feathers, pine cones and artificial leaves.

Placemats are easy for children to make. Start with a rectangle of construction paper and let the children decorate them. If they are provided with pictures of food and other Thanksgiving things to cut out from magazines, they could make a collage. They could use stickers, simple silhouettes or leaf shapes to add to their placemats as well. Another thing fun for kids, especially the younger ones, is to trace around their hands to make turkeys. If you want to preserve the placemats for later years, simply cover them in clear contact paper once the children are finished.

Napkin rings are a nice touch for each place setting. The rings could be made from strips of construction paper, card stock or toilet paper roll tubes. Feathers alone could turn them into Indian headdresses. A simple turkey body and feet with a few feathers will create a cute turkey. A pilgrim’s hat could be made easily by adding a black brim around the bottom of the ring and pasting on a paper buckle.

The children could also make pinecone turkeys as favors for each place setting. Feathers could be made from construction paper, pipe cleaners or simply use craft feathers. Glue them to the wider end of the cone, and then attach a head to the smaller end. Add some feet to help stabilize it, to keep the turkey from rolling.

Centerpieces are also a wonderful addition to the Thanksgiving table. A cornucopia is fairly easy to put together. Once a nicely shaped wicker horn is selected, the children can arrange fruits, vegetables and leaves in and around it. Depending on how long the decorations will be out, you will have to decide between fresh and artificial produce.

A turkey centerpiece can be made a few days ahead from paper mache’. Use a balloon for the base, using a standard paste recipe. Once it is dry, paint the body brown. Adding bright fall colored feathers, a body and feet will create a turkey centerpiece that will look too good to eat.

Another interesting craft the kids can make to help with the decorations is a table runner. Find a strip of fabric about a foot wide and about four feet longer than the table, to allow it to drape at either end. Using pinking sheers, a surger, or hem it, to finish off the edges so it doesn’t ravel. Then let the children use fabric permanent markers to draw the first Thanksgiving scene, complete with Indians, Pilgrims and turkeys.

The decorations the children create are sure to become family treasures enjoyed for many years to come.

There are cards available for just about every holiday out there, and Thanksgiving is no exception. But who wouldn’t love receiving a handmade card as a keepsake? With a little creativity, imagination and time, you can create wonderful cards for family and friends. There are quite a few techniques and mediums that can be used to create cards from the heart. Children and adults alike can have fun making the cards.

One of the simplest Thanksgiving cards to create is the standard “hand turkey” that can be cut out and glued to either folded construction paper, card stock or even scrapbook paper. This is a great project to do with younger kids. First, trace your child’s hand on a piece of paper, being sure to have them spread their fingers as far apart as they can. Make it dimensional, by not gluing the finger feathers down. Use a pencil to curl the feathers, so that they stand out off the paper a little.

There are many rubber stamps available in holiday themes, sometimes combined in kits. Different inks, embossing powders and paper can be combined to create unique looks, even when you use the same stamps. Practicing on scrap paper before making your final product can sometimes provide ideas that you might not have thought about, such as overlapping the same stamp a couple times, with different colors, offset a bit. This particular technique provides a shadow effect.

Stencils are also a simple way to make a nice design on your greeting cards. Using either stencil brushes or sponges can give you totally different looks. Playing with different layouts such as overlapping things can allow you to create many different and unique designs.

Stickers can also be used to create simple cards or can be combined with other mediums. There are many kinds of stickers including those with metallic accents. There is enough variety of stickers that make it easy to create a nice scene on the front of the card complete with turkeys, Pilgrims and Indians. There is also a lot of free clip art available in graphics programs and online. Many of which can be printed on sticker paper or on regular paper and glued in place.

By using some scrapbooking techniques, you can create some very artistic looking cards. Layering different kinds of paper together, changing angles, ripping edges, etc. will allow you to create an almost old fashioned look. Accenting it with stickers, paper cutouts or other details will give your card some wonderful finishing touches.

If you know calligraphy, or someone who does, hand lettering can really set off a handmade card nicely. Even if you can’t do calligraphy, there are many nice fonts that can be found on your computer. Print the words out on a nice paper, cut out creatively (scrapbooking edge scissors are great for this) and glue onto your card.

Even if you feel like you have no artistic talent at all, there are many options available to make card making easy and enjoyable. As with most handcrafted items, it doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s what makes it special; they are made with love, not mass-produced in a factory. So try your hand at a handcrafted card this Thanksgiving and let your loved ones know how thankful you are they are in your life.

Every Thanksgiving, moms and kids have a fun time creating Thanksgiving crafts, especially the making of Pilgrim hats. It also seems that every year, the traditional black hat with a belt buckle is ingenuously created to wear, hung as an ornament, or made as a centerpiece.

In researching favorite Thanksgiving crafts, there is one item that has rarely been mentioned – a Pilgrim’s Bonnet. While you may see plenty of assorted Pilgrim’s hats for men and boys, it’s time to share a few tips on how to make Pilgrim bonnets for women and girls.

If you are good at sewing, there are plenty of online sites where you can print out a pattern and make a lovely bonnet. If you would like to keep it simple, you can make a bonnet out of white paper. At your local office supply store, you will be able to locate 12×15 white paper. Lay it out on the table, and fold the back underneath about two inches and scotch tape the fold to the back of the paper. Take both corners of the top section and fold them down so they meet in the middle, then scotch tape both corners to the middle section. This is the basis of the hat. In order to wear it, fold it over your head or that of your daughter, and take a hole puncher and punch a hole at each bottom end. Take two pieces of thin white ribbon and put each one through the hole, knotting it from the inside. Now you can take each piece of ribbon that has been secured in place and tie it around the chin. Voila!

There are some wonderful traditional Pilgrim hats which can be made as centerpieces. One such hat was made using black felt material which lined a flower pot. Then a beautiful large buckled strap was placed around the middle of the pot. What was so unique about this piece was the black felt was draped to lie flat, so that when set on a table, it made a lovely centerpiece.

There are so many ways in which you can use Thanksgiving crafts to make Pilgrim hats. Be sure to include bonnets as well. Whether you make them to wear, or have the kids cut and paste to hang them proudly in their room or the kitchen. Either way, it is not only fun, but you can also start a new tradition by having the entire family wear hats and bonnets this Thanksgiving.