Thanksgiving Turkey Place Cards

I’m certain we all have an extent of weirdness to us…(What a way to start a blog post, right?!) One of my weird traits would be my slight obsession with saving plastic fruit cups. After I have so many saved up that my husband starts questioning my reasoning behind saving them I end up with a sleepless night or two conjering up ideas of exactly how to use them. You can read about some of those crafts HERE, HERE or HERE.

My latest “in the wee hours of the morning” invention is these cute Thanksgiving Turkey Place Cards… I think it’s always fun to let the kids help decorate for the holiday and these little turkey’s are a great way for them to take part.

They are quite darling just as turkey’s though too…

To make our turkeys we started by painting the outside of plastic fruit cups with brown acrylic paint. (They may require two coats, dependent on how thick you put the paint on.) Let them dry completely.

When thinking of how to attach feathers to our turkeys I instantly thought of some great products my friends at Craftprojectideas.com recently sent me: Faceted Beads and Shimmer Sticks. I am a huge fan of Craftprojectideas.com products, and found these to be of great quality and worked extremely well for this project. You can pick them up at your local Wal-Mart in the craft section.

Cut each Shimmer Stick in half to end up with two pieces per Shimmer Stick. We ended up using five of these pieces per turkey.

Next, bead each Shimmer Stick with anywhere from 8-11 beads. We left space in between the beads so the shimmer stick would show through.

Did I mention how great this is for toddlers/preschoolers for hand and eye coordination? Here is my two-year old little helper who managed to bead several strands all by herself and loved every minute of it.

Complete each feather by folding it in half and twisting the bottom together to secure the beads in place.

Next we put together our turkey faces. Glue two small wiggly eyes onto a large brown pom-pom. Cut out a small beak and waddle out of yellow and red foam sheets and glue them onto the turkey face. I did this part since the pieces were small and I used a glue gun to adhere them to the face.

We also cut some turkey feet out of an orange foam sheet. You can see in this picture below that my cup is not quite dry yet and I decided to handle it. BAD IDEA! Some of the paint came off quickly and I ended up having to do touch-ups.

Once your fruit cup is completely dry, use a hot glue gun to attach the head and feet to your cup, and the feathers to the back of your cup.

The best part about using the Shimmer Sticks is how they are bendable to position them how ever you choose on your turkey. I curved mine out a little to give them more of a full effect.

You can either leave your new turkey friend how it is, or you can print out little name strips and glue them on to use as Thanksgiving Place Cards.

To see a fun list of Turkey Books that we are reading this week to along with our Thanksgiving crafting, go HERE.And you know I have to ask, do you have any weird traits about you??