Thanks-craft-giving! 2012

Most every BIG Holiday during the year comes with a few fun traditions, must-do's, and a few surprises too. Thanksgiving is no exception..but turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and green bean casserole, followed by pumpkin pie can get a bit borring year after year.

No one really wants to mess with the traditional menu, so how about adding some special personal crafty touches to your day with these simple ideas:

Just about every house has a kid table seperate from the adult table, but let's help them feel special too.

Their own turkey!

My husband, daughter and I put this together the day before out of a few paper bags, some newspaper, white craft apaper and some hot glue. We gained our inspiration from this Blog post repined to pinterest

http://www.rookno17.com/2010/11/paper-bag-turkey-and-special.html

I also put a store bought tablecloth made for coloring on the table and added these cute crayon holders:

This was a simple make out of a black paper cup, black poster board, and some scraps of craft paper. Add its the crayons and a perfect addition to the kid table!

One tradition that my family of six began 2 years ago was having a Snoopy Thanksgiving the day before. We started doing this first just a family fun night as we were counting down to a Thanksgiving break trip to Walt Disney World and it just stuck, now we serve up a pre Thanksgiving meal Snoopy Style (with the addition of some pizza too)!

We thought wouldn't it be fun to add this family tradition to our Thanksgiving Feast? After being inspired by a pinterest post about topping a cupcake with the 4 basic Snoopy Thanksgiving items: toast, pretzels, popcorn, and jelly beans; I created these appetizer cups with my daughter's help for our tables.

These appetizer cups were quite easy to put together. I googled an image I liked of Snoopy from a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, cut it and put it on store bought clear cocktail cups (with double sided tape). We then added toasted sourdough squares and the other goodies.

The last crafty gift I added to our Thanksgiving Holiday is a Thankful Book!

what a wonderful idea and way to collect a year's worth of thanksful thoughts and blessings from your family and friends that you shared some turkey and stuffing with that year. In being thankful for what I have, I made this craft (as many of the others) from things I already owned. The heavy cardstock spiral and thanksgiving stickers and scraps I all found in my scrapbooking supplies. I found inspiration to make this book from remembering Thanksgivings of the past and  how we'd write our "I am thanksful for..." on little peices of paper ot construction paper leaves and then never really having a way to keepsake them. Plus thanks to the pinterest public I saw someone else's book of thanks:

http://eighteen25.blogspot.com/2011/11/our-book-of-thanks.html


Here are a few pictures fom the inside and the first entry from this year. We took a group shot which I will add later.

I hope I inspired a bit of crafty giving this Holiday season, from my home to yours.

And please remember the point of crafting nd/or preserving memories is NOT to add more to your "to-do" list, spend extra money, or to make a grand presentation...but it is suppose to be an outlet, expression of YOU to others. Find inspiration from books, movies, art, magazines, pinterest or wherever, ENJOY it and SHARE with others.

thanks for reading,

Julie