Let’s Make a Happy Thanksgiving Day Craft!

           Sometimes it is fun to do the traditional hand turkey, where you draw your hand on a piece of paper and make it look like a turkey. However, there are times where you just want the turkey to look a little more lifelike. Turkey crafts are oodles of fun during the Thanksgiving holiday. I know as a kid I enjoyed making my very own hand turkey and filling it with googly eyes and feathers. I’m sure it looked very turkey-like and my parents or whomever I showed to would say, “Well, that my dear, is a very fine turkey!”

     However, now in the days of Pinterest, I find it is important to put a little more effort into holiday crafts. It is important to make things appear to be more life-like, or in my case more turkey-like. Sometimes you may need to add real feathers, plucked straight from a turkey out of your backyard to make it more organic.

     My craft is not that type of craft; all you need is your simple art supplies. Good ol’ fashioned craft glue, tape, googly eyes, and construction paper. But to add a little bit of whimsy we are going to use coffee filters. How? Well, look no further to my instructions for fun and whimsical Turkey Table Favors. (Try saying that five times fast)

Turkey Table Favors

What you will need:

• Construction Paper (orange and brown)
• Scotch tape/Transparent tape
• White Craft Glue
• Googly Eyes
• Washable Markers
• Coffee Filters

What to do:

• To create the tail-
  1. Color the Coffee filter with whatever colors you’d like. I chose Yellow, Orange, Red, and Purple. The more vibrant the colors the better it seems to show. You can make a design or lines, or scribbles. This part is really fun for kids!
  2. Take the coffee filter and fold it in half and then fold it in half again to make a triangle.
  3. Take the corner tip and run it under cold water. Get the filter wet enough that you can squeeze the water across to make the colors run.
  4. Leave the filter to dry somewhere. I put it on our dish drying rack.
• To create the body-
  1. Take the brown paper, and make a circle roughly 4 inches in diameter. I used a breadcrumb can.
  2. Cut out the circle and then cut out a small triangle out of the circle.
  3. Bring the points of the circle together to create a cone and close with tape.
  4. For the base, take the orange paper and create a rectangle that is 2 ½ inches by 3 inches, but on one end create two feet
• Now create the turkey!
  1. With the dry coffee filter, fold it back into a pie wedge and fold in the middle.
  2. Attach the coffee filter tail to the orange base with tape so it stands on its own.
  3. Attach the cone with tape.
  4. Glue on two googly eyes and an orange triangle beak (you can cut it out of the orange scrap paper and if you don’t have googly eyes just make paper ones)
• Ta-da! You now have a cute little turkey. You can also personalize it by putting a name on the tail!

Create these cute turkeys with your little turkeys and have fun this Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from our families to yours!