Last minute Thanksgiving ideas

Happy Thanksgiving to our American family and friends!  It’s always great to celebrate and give God thanks for all His blessings!

There were a couple of extra Thanksgiving ideas that I forgot to add to my Canadian Thanksgiving post so I thought I’d quickly share them here.  I’m always doing things last minute and I’m wondering if anyone else does it too….so here are some free printables and ideas for some last minute Thanksgiving decor! 

These lovely printable pages are from Hope Ink, and I printed them off on kraft colored cardstock.  Here is the cozy house coloring page  and the cute turkey coloring page.  Perfect for Thanksgiving!  I used them for decorating my piano, and then forgot to let the kids color them!  They would look great colored in with those really nice colored pencils (Prismacolor I think?)

I found another great printable at The Creativity Exchange for a child’s chalkboard place-mat.  This is such a fun idea, to have a black area that can be used as a chalkboard.  I printed out the regular-paper sized one, also on kraft cardstock, so the plate is oval shaped, but if you print out the larger size the plate is round.  My printer’s out of colored ink, so the color you see here isn’t what would print out on your printer! 🙂  Here’s our Menu for today: It would make a great place setting with your guest’s name written on it in chalk….or just a fun place-mat for the kids to write on!

Oh yes, there’s also the printable that I came up with for my living room frame…you can find the link here.

Some more last minute Thanksgiving decor ideas….use fruit.  Wooden fruit, plastic fruit or real fruit.  I was looking through some old Thanksgiving photos and noticed that that is what I tend to do.  Especially grapes.  Grapes appear adorning a naked turkey (in the family photo), and around jello salad and on plates, cake stands, everywhere!  So that’s my big advice.  Have some grapes on hand, and maybe a few other fruits.  Just in case.  You never know. And if you are really running last minute and the turkey isn’t thawed and the pies aren’t baked….You can always do what Charlie Brown did……serve them buttered toast, popcorn, jelly beans and pretzels!!!  🙂 The idea is to be together and to be grateful.  The rest is all “dressing”!!

Thanksgiving printable for your fall decor

Thanksgiving is almost here for us Canadians, are you ready?  I’m still housecleaning and baking like a crazy.  Kind of.  I keep getting distracted by little fun things, like decorating or going through boxes that I haven’t seen for a while.  I saw a list yesterday that said countdown to Thanksgiving, and shows you what to do each week, for 4 weeks before the event!!  Things like start baking, send out invitations, etc.  And it says 4 weeks before: finish major housecleaning!  I figure that if I changed weeks to days, I’d be right on schedule.

Decorating is so much more fun than cleaning and de-cluttering.  I have a frame in my living room that is for changing, with the seasons, or with the birthdays, whatever.  It’s easy to pop out the picture and add something new.  I was looking around for a “free Thanksgiving printable” to print and frame, and I found lots of nice ones, but they were in color.  And even if I switched them to black and white, they’d be all grey and use up tons of ink.  I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m down to only black ink, so I made up something myself to print out for my frame, and thought I’d post it here, in case anyone else with a black-ink-only printer problem would like to have one for their Thanksgiving decor.  All the fonts I used are by Kimberly Geswein,  I really like her stuff!  Ooh, I just saw some new ones on her blog that I want, nice very nice!  There are links on her blog to download all her fonts, and she has examples, so you can see what the fonts look like in a paragraph form.  The  border is artwork by the Gypsy Chick, that I had for commercial use.  (warning: blurry photos ahead!)

The printable is for a 8 1/2 by 11″ page, but my frame takes 12×12″, so I printed off 2 and cut one up to go behind the other.  My printer also didn’t print to the edge of the page, so I had to shave some off.  The printable should go to the edge of your page, if you can set your printer to do that.  So this is what I did: 

Trimmed.

Added some dollar store leaves behind the main page.

I don’t like the placement of the red leaf, but am trying to tell myself to just leave it, to not take everything down to rearrange!!! grrrrr.  Oh well.  So this is what it looks like, and you can click on the folder below to download a zipped folder.  Unzip and print!  Let me know if it’s not working, since, ahem, it’s been awhile since I’ve uploaded a printable….  This photo below is just the example, and somehow one of the words is cut off and there’s a watermark that says personal use only, so that means it’s just for you to use in your home, y’know, no copying or selling or that kind of thing!

Find the original copy for your personal printing use here:

Baby Boy Birthday Cake Topper

Have some more birthday cake!!  Here’s the paper cake topper that goes along with my last post for a Baby Boy Birthday card.  I saw these printables for a paper jungle train…usually they are used for favor boxes at a party…but I thought I could shrink them down and use them for a cake topper, just for something different for a One Year Birthday cake.

You can find the jungle animals and paper carts for downloading here at Paperglitter.  As I mentioned in my last post, I used 2 kits, the colorized version and the blank Color-Me version….I felt like mixing and matching!  First I printed out the color-me carts on kraft paper, shrinking them down to 45%.  The colorized animals I printed at 48% to get them just a tad larger.  

You can customize the text, so I wrote something different on each cart.  On one side of the first cart was HAPPY HAPPY, and on the other side of the same cart it said FELIZ FELIZ.  the next cart said BIRTHDAY and CUMPLEANOS.  So each cart had the English on one side and the Spanish on the other…so later on I could decide which side I wanted to have facing the front.  I don’t know why, but I put the English side facing out….here’s the back view, I should have done it the other way around!!  Oh well, everyone at the party spoke both languages! 🙂In planning it all out, it helped to jot down a plan (so I wouldn’t mess something up!), like which animal was going with with word on which cart!  After cutting out the carts, sticking the edges together with double sided tape,  I printed out the color-me  jungle leaves on light green cardstock and cut them out.  For the wheels, I decided to use my new button punch and a solid color cardstock instead of the printable wheels.  Here’s the button punch/embosser (from Martha Stewart) I love it!:After assembling the carts and cutting out the animals, I taped each animal onto a toothpick and then taped one inside of each cart.  Then before I glued the wheels on I taped a toothpick (the flat kind) to the back of each cart, right where a wheel would go, and stuck the wheel on over it.  (note: also a good idea to plan out which side of each cart the toothpick should go!) Back view:(I was in a rush, that’s why the tape is visible.  The best way would be to glue, or maybe even hot glue, everything on with time for them to dry, then you wouldn’t see any tape!)  Here’s the front of the cart:After the four carts are all assembled with wheels and animals, then make your cake!! haha.  Long pause…………I wanted 2 different sized layers, since I wasn’t sure if the whole jungle train would fit across the 6 inch layer cake. ( The cake ended up being yellow and light teal alternating layers inside).  I was trying reallly hard to match the icing color up with the cardstock wheel color!!

After the cake was iced,  I carefully stuck each little cart on.  Some of them could have probably used 2 toothpicks to help stabilize them, but I just tried to push the wheels of the end carts into the sides of the cake!Without too much rearranging, I was pleased with the “random” train across the cake.  Looks like they are going for a wild ride!When the carts were pushed into the cake, I joined them up with the little jungle leaves (with little slits cut into them).I photographed the cake at home, and then took it to the party….not realizing how windy is was outside!!  The little paper train shifted a bit, but we were able to get it to the party intact!!  (Just a few leaves needed to be stuck back on).

Oh yes, don’t forget to add the Birthday Boy’s name and age!!The birthday boy seemed happy with his jungle animal train cake!!  Happy First Birthday!!