[an easy and quick Thanksgiving craft]

Thanksgiving is just a couple days away, can you even believe it?! We have been put in charge of bringing pies and I'll be making my favorite simple, yet super delicious, apple pie. Jon is going to experiment with a caramel pumpkin pie of sorts. Yuumm, I'm getting hungry just thinking about it. Can't wait!

We have also been put in charge of coming up with a simple craft to keep the kiddos occupied while we cook, cook, cook! And I think we've come up with just the thing. These simple DIY festive turkey feather headbands are just the thing to keep your Littles entertained while you stuff those birds and mash those potatoes. And to make things extra easy for you, I've provided downloadable templates of both the headbands and the feathers.

I printed the headbands out on a 13"x17" sheet of bristol paper (but any sort of stiff cardstock/poster board paper should work). If you don't have a large format printer, you can take this file to your local copy shop and have them print out of few for you. You'll see on the template that I added a bit more of the pattern beneath as you'll most likely need it to wrap fully around your child's head. Once printed you can have your kids decorate the headbands with watercolors, crayons, colored pencils, you name it...basically whatever you kids are into and what makes things easy on you.

Little O really enjoyed delving into the watercolors. I painted a few spots to get him started and then just let him go at it.

I then created a number of feathers out of black scrapbook paper and had them decorate them with white colored pencils and chalk. Little O (3 years) did a little scribble and was pretty much done after that. Little A (5 years) on the other hand really got into it.

I was so in love with what he did. I was really impressed with his variety and restraint. On his own he chose to color one feather completely with white colored pencil. Then he did another where he drew in the feather lines with blue chalk. For the last one he chose to do just a touch of blue on the end of the feather. Love the variety kiddo. I'm seriously impressed. You'd think I was a proud mama or something :).

He then chose to decorate his headband with water colors after we adhered the feathers. True to his nature, he took it pretty seriously. Little O was adorable as he was completely enamored with what his big brother was doing.

I loved how they both turned out.

And the boys were very into them as well. In fact, they wore them the rest of the afternoon and into the evening.

I think they really loved doing something for Thanksgiving as they keep stating to me, in response to my Christmas music listening, "Mom! it's not Christmas yet. It's Thanksgiving!" It was like they were just waiting to officially do something to celebrate this holiday. I'm so glad too as it lead to a conversation about the first Thanksgiving and how so many came together in a time of celebration, despite their differences.

I also made a few freezer paper stencil shirts for them and Little O refused to take his off. For the cute little turkey I used this stencil from Alison's cute blog.

I'm so glad we did end up doing something festive for Turkey Day. They were so happy. And quite adorable.

And what about that black Friday shopping. Any plans? I hope to hit up a few shops...and then I'll being doing some sort of Cyber Monday sale at Tuesday Mourning, so check back in after you are stuffed to the gills and all rested up. Have a fabulous Thanksgiving week/weekend!