Yay! I'm back! Finally my computer is letting me upload photos and the internet is working at the same time so let's celebrate Thanksgiving by getting our hands dirty with a Turkey Day gobble gobble craft!
I have been searching for something fun to do to somehow rope in the Thanksgiving spirit. So of course, like everyone else, I came up up with a Turkey craft! But this is a big Turkey craft, like it takes several DAYS and it's super messy! Sorry Mom but I'm sure the kids will love that part!
This was a learning experience for me since I haven't done Paper Mache since I was in middle school but I was super pumped to take it on.
I started with making the mache part of our project. I used one cup of flour for 2 cups of water and stirred it together on the stove till it thickened. If it's too thick just add water till you get the thinner consistency, stirring as you add.
Get some newspaper and shred it by hand. I found the easiest size to manage is a length around 8 inches and a width of 1-1 1/2 inches.
Our shred pile.
I had some paper towel rolls around so I cut them in 2-3 inch pieces for our turkey legs.
I taped them on the bottom of the balloon and tried to put them in the right spot to hold the balloon up like turkey legs.
R and I with our
project! My son gets so excited when we are going to do a project and he runs around the house telling everyone that he needs to work on our project.
Our paper mache turkey. It was pretty easy covering the balloon and legs but you have to be sure to wipe off the excess mache so your turkey will dry.
Set the turkey outside so it can dry. This is VERY important so it doesn't mildew. Below is my failed attempt at rushing the process by not popping the balloon and sticking it in the oven at 200 degrees to dry. This girl forgot about air expanding when it gets warm and it caused the balloon to expand and break my paper!
After the first layer is dry, you can just paint it brown with some brown paint or do a second layer of macho with brown construction paper like I did.
Now for the feathers and face. We used R's hands to make a blueprint for the feathers. We traced his hands twice on each piece of construction paper.
I used all these different colors to make the feathers since I like a colorful tail.
To duplicate the hands, I just stacked all the pieces of paper under the traced and cut so I only hand to cut two hands. Then I glued a hand to each popsicle stick and let dry.
Next, for the feet I used a egg carton and cut it and just worked with it to fit in the legs to hold the turkey to stand up.
Now, for the face. I just free cut the neck from black construction paper and cut two triangle from an orange sheet.
Below is a visual step by step to make the beak.
To get the feather to go in the body, I just used a knife along the back of the body for holes to put the popsicle sticks in.
Tada! Happy Turkey Day!
