Thanksgiving Turkey Wreath

Have you all seen my Thanksgiving Turkey Wreath yet from my guest post at Sugar Bee Crafts? Well if you haven’t, check it out!

I LOVE wreathes, they’re one of my most favorite things to make and we don’t yet have a Thanksgiving wreath for our front door, so this was the perfect opportunity to make one and show all of you what I came up with.

 I call this my Thanksgiving Turkey wreath and I made it using things I had around my craft room {as you can tell, I have a lot of unused materials in my craft room haha}.

Wreath form–I used a straw form
Burlap to wrap the wreath
Yarn
Ribbon (optional)
Hot glue
Scissors
Felt
Paper and DimplePrints printables
Paper
Twine
**Anything else you’d like to add to your wreath

1. To start out I took my wreath form and wrapped it in burlap and used hot glue and some pins to hold the burlap in place. Don’t worry if it doesn’t lay flat, mine didn’t lie flat either and I kind of liked the layered look it had, so I didn’t work too hard to fix it. It’s up to you and your own tastes though while wrapping the wreath.

 2. After I wrapped my wreath, I got started working on my little turkey. The turkey was made my balling up a sheet of newspaper and using tape to hold it all together and round it out. Don’t worry about making your newspaper ball perfect, as you wrap it with yarn you can shape it as you go.

Once my newspaper was formed, I tied the yarn around the newspaper ball, tied and knotted it, and then got to wrapping my ball. I wrapped it for a while until everything was covered and then I hot glued the end of the yarn in place. It really doesn’t take as much yarn as you’d think.

3. After the turkey’s body was complete, I got to working on his head. Honestly, there’s no good way to show you how I did his head. I basically took the yarn and wrapped it around my fingers 20 or so times and then pulled it off my fingers and balled it up. From there I just kept wrapping my little ball of yarn until it was the size I wanted. At that point, I hot glued the end of the yarn into place and attached my turkey head to the turkey body.

I also took a tiny little triangle of orange felt and hung it from the turkey’s chin as his little “gobbler” 🙂

4. Next up was making the turkey’s feathers. I had tan, cream, and orange felt on hand, so those were the colors I used. I just kind of free handed a feather and repeated it for 2 feathers of each color. Then I arranged them the way I wanted and used pins to push them into my turkey. Once I got them arranged the way I wanted, I hot glued them down.

5. Now your turkey should be all done! You just need to attach it onto your wreath. In my case, before I attached it, I added some yarn wrapped around the wreath form just to spice it up a bit. This is completely option and you could add a little yarn, a lot of yarn, and many other things to your likings and taste. For me–I just wanted something simple, so I wrapped my orange yarn around the wreath and then attached my turkey with hot glue {a lot of hot glue!}.

6. Once your turkey is fixed on you’re all set to do what you like. I decided to use DimplePrints’ FREE Thanksgiving Party Package (I blog for them too!), print off their patterned paper, and make little pennants saying “give thanks” on them. I used my Silhouette to cut out the letters and I glued them onto twine and then hot glued the twine in between each side of the wreath. I REALLY liked that addition.

7. I also decided to add some felt flowers to my creation. Beth at Home Stories A to Z has an amazing tutorial on how to make felt flowers. If you want to see how, check out her site.

And that’s it! Here’s some more photos of the finished product. I’m very happy with it.