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.