Thanksgiving Card

I woke up one day with an itching to do a craft.  I decided to make turkey-hands with my boy.  My original idea was just to do a simple painted hand, where I painted the palm of his hand brown, and his fingers different colors, but when I got started, Ephraim had a different idea.  He didn't want his hands painted, and he wanted to be painting with the paintbrush, and as many of you know, there is no reasoning with a 16 month old.  However, the end result is something that I like even more, so I decided to share how I made a hand-turkey craft that is toddler friendly!

Materials:

• Paper Bag (maybe two)
• Paint- Brown, Red, Gold
• Permanent Markers- black, red
• Glue
• Scrapbook Paper

How To:

First make hand prints.  Here is where persistence pays off.  Ephraim was not in the mood to make hand prints, and kept putting his hands in fists.  I would pry his hands open and little bit and paint his hand brown and pry it open a little bit again and try and force it onto the paper.  It took a few attempts to get what I wanted, but it ended up working.  I wanted to share the picture above to show you that it didn't work out at first.

Then I set the handprints aside and let Ephraim do what he really wanted to do, which was paint with the paint brush.  I gave him some gold and pinkish red paint to paint with, and let him go to town on half of a paper bag.  Then I gave him a bath and finished the rest while he was napping.

I used a black sharpie to draw the Turkey on the hands.

Then I used a red sharpie to add some details.

Then I cut out my turkeys.

This is where my toddler's creativity is included in this craft.

I took his beautiful painting and traced some additional feathers to go behind the turkey.

Here is what they look like cut out.

Then I drew some texture onto the background feathers.

 Here is the Turkey :-)

I put the turkey on a 5x7 sheet of scrapbook paper to make a little card.  I used a little craft glue to glue the background feathers and the turkey to the paper.  I didn't glue the brown finger feathers to the background feathers, because I liked the dimension it added.

Then I took a piece of the paper bag and ripped it down to a size for a little tag above the Turkey.

Then I wrote a message on it.

Crumpled it up to add some more dimension.

Then I glued it with craft glue to the paper.

I also used one of the turkeys to make an 8x10 picture to hang up in my living room using the same techniques.