Thanksgiving Crafts

My mother has put me in charge of decorating the Thanksgiving dinner table and coordinating a few projects to keep my daughter and my cousin’s daughter busy – both under 4. So, why not kill two turkeys with one stone…here’s what we’ll be doing…I hope.

• “Thankful” Turkey : My daughter will be thrilled to spend a lot of time cutting out construction paper turkey feathers so that each of our guests can write down what they are thankful for this year. And, I’m sure her younger cousin will have fun wrapping the polystyrene balls in yarn.
• Place Cards : We’ll have 14 people for dinner, so place cards will come in handy. We love fingerprint art, so this is sure to be a hit.
• I have wanted to do something with the beautiful fall leaves we have had this Fall so this leaf lantern will make a great decoration for our table
  
  I have lots of glass jars leftover from the canning I never did this summer (well, I did some, but not nearly as much as I thought I would). I can get the Mod Podge, brushes and tea lights all at the craft store.
  
  How to make a fall leaf lantern:
  
1. Cover a side of a glass jar with Mod podge.
   
2. Place a pressed leaf (pressed for at least 36 hours – we’ll collect the leaves this weekend and press them until we can do the gluing on Wednesday) on the Mod Podge.
   
3. Cover the leaf with Mod Podge. You can layer the leaves on top of each other as long as you have the Mod Podge on them.
   
4. After the leaves dry put another coat of Mod Podge over the entire jar to seal the leaves.  (If we don’t get our act together in time, Plan B is to use fall colored tissue paper rather than leaves. Knowing me, my guess is that we’ll use tissue paper…)
   

Wish me luck – I may be committing to a lot more than we can handle. Hopefully, I won’t be posting an update next week that I did all of the crafts by myself while the girls ran around the house or played with dolls, or about our plain glass jar lanterns, plain white place cards and the unused polystyrene balls that never turned into a turkey.


Gobble gobble gobble.

--Commuter Mom