Blast From the Past: Turkey Plate

I sat down one day and decided on all the keepsake crafts I was going to do with my grandchildren each year. On their very first Thanksgiving, I'm making these adorable little Footprint Turkey Plates! It wasn't my intention to do turkeys first BUT it is so much easier to do footprints with under 1's!!

As you have probably come to realize - I get my most recent inspiration from Pinterest. Nothing is different in this case either lol I took 3 ideas off of my Grandbabies:: First Thanksgiving board (which needs a new name cause this actually holds ideas for like the first 10 years!!). The ideas are this one, that one, and the other one. These three ideas are a cached image found here, My Rural Mommy which has several cute ideas, and SheKnows Pregnancy & Baby.

So, you see what I did there? I combined them! Feet all the way! I tried to use the hands and quickly realized trying to do baby handprints with paint or ink simply is a FAIL! Do not try it unless you are elast-a-mom with 8 tentacles - just don't do it.

I will tell you what you can do with baby handprints though - that's clay impressions or tracing! I did a little of that as well - tracing that is. But that's another post for another day.

This was a super cheap craft for me to make such a precious memory. I already had the paints so all I had to do was pick up a plate from the dollar store and wah-lah! Later, I had to spend a couple more $$ on a way to hang the plate (notice I had to rig up a display in order to take a picture ... there was simply too much glare when it was laying flat). Still well worth the price! The little man was so cute doing this - it tickled his feet to have them painted but he was such a good sport!! He was a little captivated by the whole process lol His favorite part was getting to sit on the side of the sink and playing in the water - such a ball of cuteness!! This was pretty much an all day activity between having to wait for paint to dry and naps before moving on to the next color. Experience is teaching me how to get better at getting those sweet little impressions. Now watch it be different for each baby!

So what's my plan with these little plates, you ask? I'm so glad you asked! And I really can't wait to show you - this coming November ;-) I bought some little hanging plate holders. They have springs so that it is adjustable to the size plate you have. I knew I wouldn't have enough flat "table" space to display the number of plates I will eventually have.... so I was a wee bit excited to find those little gems so I could hang them on the wall without having to attach some funky equipment that might come loose and risk breaking these precious plates that I can never replace.

God-willing, every grand child will make one of these on their first Thanksgiving! The ones so far away will be more difficult but at the same time will be all the more precious because of the distance.

Clay Hearts

What I was going for and what I got were two different things! Heh, not everything can go wondrously ;-)

I used a different recipe than the normal salt dough I typically use. While I do really like it better than the salt dough, it took a little working with to get it the right consistency - which took up a lot of my time I wasn't prepared to give. Anyway, I used a recipe calling for baking soda and cornstarch rather than salt and flour. I found it at Tips From a Typical Mom blog. I decided to try this new recipe for two reasons:

1) It just looked nicer in the photos, and...
2) I'm allergic to gluten and have to wear gloves when working with salt dough

Just makes sense to use the cornstarch recipe instead.

I think I baked them a little too long, rather than allowing the final cooling stage to completely dry them out. Some warped and cracked during the final baking phase I put them through - an hour longer than called for in the recipe. Even at the end of that hour, when I flipped them over there were "not completely dried spots." I decided at that point to let them air dry. Three cracked so badly they broke right there on the pan without me ever picking them up! I was so careful when handling the rest of them!!

As it was, I had wanted to make conversation hearts out of these, but didn't realize I didn't have enough cornstarch to make multiple batches. See, you add color to the water if you want to tint the dough. Makes me glad I used red first so that I at least had pink hearts instead of all orange or green!

I have seen these adorable hanging works of art where green ornaments are hung in a manner that they fall into the shape of a Christmas tree. I love the concept - a lot! So I thought, why not hang the hearts in the shape of a heart?? Cute in idea concept, not so cute in actuality when I don't really have the proper way to hang said hearts. I had wanted them to hang from my chandelier as seen in this photo on Pinterest. The idea comes from an article on SheKnows. In the past couple of years, I had been hanging these little paper doily hearts via ornament hooks on the chandelier. It was kinda cute the first year, but not so much the second. Hence, why I wanted to find something else to do this third year. I probably should have stuck to simply hanging them instead of getting all cutesy with a 3D, floating shape!!

The center heart has an XO stamped in the center of it. I had done that when I thought I was going to be making a bunch of conversation hearts. Perhaps next year!

 

Did you notice my un-paper towels laying beside the stove?