Thanksgiving Reflections

Our Thanksgiving holiday was a wonderful time for us to spend with our families and think about all of the wonderful people and opportunities in our lives. It also reminded us what a pleasure it is for us to craft and to share our crafts with others.

Crafting is so much more than just creating decorations or gifts. It’s a time to be creative and bond with friends and family. And in one special case, it was a time to learn a new culture and share some of our own.

A few summers ago we sent Kelly’s suncatchers with the Monaghan Baptist Church on their mission trip to Jamaica. We paint suncatchers all the time. We get excited by the new designs and love to get creative with them. But even we weren’t prepared for the reaction we got. 

The people our friends at Monaghan Baptist visited had never seen anything like our suncatchers before. They took excitement to a new level. And we got to see a craft we do every day through fresh eyes.

The Monaghan Baptist was a success on many levels. We are so glad we got to be a part of it.

Frame It Up for Thanksgiving

We’ve been trying to pull together some fun and quick ideas for your Thanksgiving dinner. This project is an old favorite – easy enough to do for everyone at your table and pretty enough to keep in your house all year long. 

You can get this project done in no time – you just need a frame, some jute or twine and our fall leaves assortment. If you want to change the look a little bit, you can use felt instead of jute for the background. If you stick with the jute, simply wrap it around the frame. Place and then glue your leaves and you’re done!

If you want to use this as a name plate on your table, simply print or write your guests’ names on cardstock and put it in place. Or, take your favorite Thanksgiving photo and proudly display it.

Happy Thanksgiving from New Image Group!

Cute Critters

With their reputations for making a mess of the garbage, raccoons may not be the most welcome sight in your yard. But these guys will stay exactly where you put them. And maybe even get a little giggle out of you. They are easy to make and could even make for cute and unexpected little name holders at your Thanksgiving table. Click here for instructions.

Felt Crafts for Kids

With the weather turning colder and rain and snow moving in, you may be looking for things to keep the kids busy if they’re stuck in the house. Our friends at Better Homes and Gardens have just the thing with this selection of felt projects for kids of all ages. In fact, all of these projects would make great homemade holiday gifts.

Gobble Gobble!

Thanksgiving is just over a week away. While you’re pulling out all of your recipe cards and making shopping lists, the kids may be itching to do something, too. How about making a fun decoration for the front door?

This project was born out of necessity. My son gets so excited about Halloween every year that by the time we’re thinking about Thanksgiving, all of the best decorations are long gone. So we improvised. We found a plain, pre-made, wooden leaf wreath in the clearance section of a local store.

Then we went through our stash of felt and pulled out our favorite Fall colors and got to work. It’s important to note that for this project we used EZ Felt. Our wreath wasn’t big enough to support all of our turkey feathers. The stiffness of EZ felt meant that our turkey feathers would stay at attention, even if they didn’t have part of the wreath right behind them.

We wanted the colors of our turkeys to really pop, so on some of the feathers we laid Soft Felt over the EZ Felt. This also added dimension to our turkeys.

How did we make the turkeys? Easy. We drew the number 8 on our felt pieces in different sizes until we found the size we really liked. Then we cut out three turkey bodies. For the feathers we drew parentheses ( ), closing the tops so that we had a point and then cut them out. If you look closely at our project you’ll notice that while the feathers all look similar, none of them are the exact same size. Much like you’d find on an actual bird.

We used craft glue to put it all together and gave the turkeys some personality with google-eyes. Finally, we cut a square of felt that was just big enough to cover the area where we attached the turkey feathers and glued it to the back.

Once all of the glue was dry we broke out the hot glue gun and put a healthy amount on the backs of our turkeys and placed them on our wreath. We laid it flat to dry and cure overnight. The next day it was ready to go on our front door.

My son loved doing this project. With the exception of hot gluing the turkeys to the wreaths he was involved every step of the way and loves telling people which turkey is supposed to be him. (It’s the one on the left.) With the exception of letting the hot glue cure overnight, we were able to complete this project in one evening, after dinner. So even if you pull this together at the last minute, you can still have it ready for Thanksgiving Day.