How to Make a Thanksgiving Turkey Photo Garland

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World!

Because all your loved ones are just a bunch of turkeys!

Looking for a fun, festive, fuss-free decoration for Thanksgiving? I LOVE this personalized turkey garland that illustrates all of your guests and loved ones as their truest selves. It’s super easy to create, can be displayed just about anywhere, and is guaranteed to be the hit of the holiday! For bonus points, it also allows you to show all your loved ones that you love them so much that you’re willing to sneakily print photos of them off of social media for your own nefarious purposes. Everyone needs regular reminders that their photos aren’t safe online!

Here’s how!

Materials

Here’s everything that you need to make this personalized turkey garland:

• photos of friends, family, and pets. Choose 4″x6″ photos that are cropped so that the chosen head is between 3″ and 3.5″ tall. It doesn’t even matter if this makes the head a bit pixelated or blurry–we’re not making an heirloom that will be passed down to future generations here… or ARE we?!?
• brown cardstock or similar paper. Construction paper or brown paper bags would also work well for this. Thin cardboard food packaging could also work in a pinch, but it’s not quite dark enough for a perfect match. If you get really desperate, just take a brown crayon or marker to white cardstock–a bit of scribbly effect would honestly make this look even funnier!
• white paper. Junk mail envelopes or any scrap white paper, including the backs of receipts, is fine for this. I used the non-watermarked parts of the backs of the cropped photos for this, and I managed to squeak out juuuuust enough!
• white printer paper and a pencil for tracing. Any thin white paper will do.
• scissors and glue. For my first iteration of this project, I used double-sided tape, but maybe I keep the thermostat too cold in my house, because it would not stay stuck! Using white Elmer’s glue took only a few seconds longer, and I’m confident that everything will stay stuck. You could probably also get away with using hot glue, but you’d have to be careful not to warp the paper with the heat.
• twine and tape for the garland.

Step 1: Create the turkey template.

Because this is just for your own personal use, Google to find a copyright-free line art illustration of a cartoon-style turkey carcass, blown up on your computer screen to approximately 6.5″ tall. You can absolutely use a different size, but remember to resize the photo heads to be proportionate.

Gently rest a piece of white printer paper over the image, then gently trace it with a pencil.

Cut out the image to make the turkey template, then separately trace and cut out just the leg bone to make the leg bone template.

Step 2: Trace and cut out all the pieces.

For each turkey, you need one photo head, one turkey cut from brown cardstock, and two leg bones cut from white paper.

For the best photo heads, try to cut exactly around each person’s head, omitting any part of their neck and all their extra chins. I tried to keep most of each person’s hairstyle, although I gave little haircuts as necessary.

If you have multiples of these to make and a computerized die-cutter, I HIGHLY recommend creating a vector image that can be machine-cut. I have a Cricut, and although I don’t use it for most projects, I loooooove using it for tedious and time-consuming projects like this!

Step 3: Glue all the pieces together.

Place the head to slightly overlap the top of the carcass, place the white leg bone pieces over the brown leg bone template, and glue everything in place. If there’s some brown leg bone peeking out around the white leg bone pieces, just trim it away.

Step 4: Attach the finished turkeys to the garland.

Tape the twine to the back of each turkey in two spots, adjusting the spacing however you prefer. Leave enough twine at each end of the garland to tie it.

Alternatively, you could mount these decorations to a window or mirror with Command strips (I sent a set of my kid and her roommates to them to stick to their dorm room door), or attach them to place card holders to show everyone where they should sit at the Thanksgiving table.

I know it’s probably a little immature, but I absolutely CANNOT stop laughing at my Thanksgiving turkey photo garland. Why is the one with the dog randomly the funniest?!?

Don’t eat turkey? It would take a little more work, but I also think you could pop someone’s head on top of a piece of cardstock pumpkin pie for equal humor, or rig each person up as their own personal Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. I call dibs on Snoopy!

P.S. Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page for photos, resources, and other bits of the weird stuff I do all day.

I Drove 12 Hours To Visit Baron Von Steuben, The Queen of Afternoon Tea's Favorite Shop, and I Guess My College Student

You know, since I'm in the neighborhood!

Also, it was actually 13 hours with traffic, but that's fine because it gave me plenty of time to get acquainted with my newest Special Interest:

Omg Grant is struggling so hard with his alcoholism! I feel awful for him, and also increasingly exasperated every time he goes on another drinking binge. But he's so sad and lonely! He had to transfer stations to California, and apparently the most reasonable way there was to get on a ship and sail all the way around the entirety of South America, so he told his wife, Julia, that she shouldn't bring their toddler and her massively pregnant self along on the voyage. It was definitely the right call, because all the soldiers' children who did travel with them died, but still, it was months upon months before he even knew if she and their baby had survived childbirth, much less what the baby's name was, and that baby was two years old before he saw him for the first time. And meanwhile, Grant was completely unable to cope with how much he missed them and got so continually drunk that he had to resign from the Army, and then he was too broke to get home because he just keeps on falling for conmen. 

Also, Julia's family are slave owners, which is obviously a huge issue. And they HAAAAATE Grant! Grant's family also hates Julia, and to be honest it's a little bit funny but I'm sure it sucked so bad to live through. Grant's dad sucks, too.

ANYWAY, Grant and Julia will at some point in their future live reasonably close to the hotel I finally poured my creaky self into after 13 hours on the road:

Speaking of creaky...

You know who else didn't have a safe elevator?

THIS GUY!!!

So, yeah. I drove 12 hours (13 with traffic!) to visit my beloved child for a couple of days, but by "visit," I generally tend to mean that I want us to do a bunch of sightseeing at tourist destinations that I have chosen in advance, and we will yap constantly at each other and catch up on all our gossip, etc., while we do this sightseeing, with interruptions in the conversation only for the purpose of taking one million photos of the sights I brought us to see.

We therefore yapped our heads off while I admired and photographed the Grand Parade in its autumn splendor--

--and then we yapped our heads off while we got afternoon tea at the very first tea shop to ever earn a full 5 out of 5 stars in the Queen of Afternoon Tea's series, "The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Yummy":

We agreed that those 5 stars were very well earned, although the prices have gone up since the Queen of Afternoon Tea visited:

Nevertheless, we thought our afternoon tea was well worth the price. Everything was lovely and comfy and relaxed (these are important criteria since our afternoon tea at the Wolseley in London, which was lovely but we have come to realize was NOT comfy and relaxed), our tea was delicious--

--the food was beautiful and also delicious--

Coronation chicken and 35th anniversary blend tea!

--and there was so much of it that I was still finishing up the last of the desserts two nights later, in one of the most delightful evenings spent alone that I can remember. Imagine a hotel room all to oneself, a VERY good book on one's nook (second book in a very good series, with the third book ready to go right after!), hockey on the TV, and the last few bits and bobs of this to munch on:

In short, it was just really nice to sit for an hour eating and drinking and people watching and discussing everyone we had each interacted with in the past 6 weeks and everything they had said and what we had thought about it and what books we'd read and how much we like Jack Wolfe's singing and when we thought we'd see him again and what show he might be doing at that time. 

The whole precious two days that I got to spend with my kid went just like that, yapping and shopping (she never brings enough clothes to school, even though I tell her every semester to bring more clothes!) and meandering around campus--

--poking around various interesting spots, like this autumnal photo setting that was just randomly hanging out in the sunken garden--

--or the obligatory old cemetery that MUST exist on every college campus--

--snooping around for interesting books in the library--

--eating SO much cafeteria food that I did not have to prepare for myself--

--and discussing the symptoms of alcohol poisoning just as some poor soul was loudly vomiting in the bathroom down the hall:

My favorite campus spot is the dye garden:

Cotinus coggygria makes yellow!

Flax also makes yellow.

The woad had gone to seed, so I grabbed a plastic sandwich baggie out of my backpack (one must ALWAYS travel with ample sandwich baggies--one never knows what one might want to contain!) and collected some seeds. I will be VERY excited if I manage to cultivate my very own woad plants from seed next year.

One of the dorms used to be an ancient office building, with these lovely interior doors with multi-paneled glass that let in tons of glorious light. But it turns out that dorm rooms don't actually work with giant windows in their doors, so every year the residents get to paint their windows however they like:

Residents tend to preserve the best ones, so some of these paintings have been up for a very long time!

All the halls have themes, and all the themes are unhinged. This hall's theme is Viral Internet Animals:

One of the nights that I was visiting, the dining halls hosted a Halloween party for their student employees, and the kid let me be her plus-one. She fetched me apple cider doughnuts and hot apple cider, and let me paint over the lines that she drew and even do a little bit of carefully-managed coloring in (ahem):

The most important steps were left to her artistic expertise, of course, because otherwise--

--our little Pottsfield resident wouldn't look so cute!

The kid kept her pumpkin to decorate her dorm room, and I left her to get ready for a Mean Girls movie night with her buddies ("On October 3rd, he asked me what day it was. 'It's October 3rd'") while I crashed back in my hotel room, because I needed my sleep for the next day's travels: New Jersey! Thomas Edison! Leaf peeping!!!

The worst thing about hotel rooms is how I'm always pretty sure I'm going to be axe murdered, but don't worry, because this elaborately constructed tangle of clothes hangers is actually not fragile and about to fall apart if touched but instead the key to my feeling of safety:

The BEST thing about hotels rooms is hockey on the TV!

Notice the leftover pastries from our afternoon tea. Not pictured: me in my pajamas, awesome book on my nook, Diet Sprite liberated from the dining hall Halloween party.

Next stop: New Jersey!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The American Girl Dolls Have Brand-New Halloween Fits

Because if you're not sewing detailed Halloween costumes for American Girl dolls, are you even a perimenopausal empty nester?

Actually... can I still say that I'm an empty nester when I have my college graduate living at home? Does it even count as living at home when she spends all her time either outside the house making pizzas for below a living wage or in her room applying to every job available for early career scientists?

And while I'm on the subject, what's with every job available for early career scientists actually requiring 1-3 years of professional experience? I get that three years is still "early" in one's career, but there really ought to be something in the world that a brand-new college graduate can do other than Americorps, which, I might add, also does not pay a living wage!

So, maybe I'm light on the empty nest these days, but I am VERY heavy on the perimenopause, as my active and palpable continuous rage informs me, and for some reason there is nothing that calms my perimenopausal rage like sewing doll clothes, so leave me alone and let me have my peace.

This American Girl doll skeleton costume is a basic long-sleeved T-shirt and full-length leggings, but before I finished each garment I appliqued onto it the skeleton bones that Mr. Craft Knife designed for me. The bones are cut with my Cricut from white jersey knit (upcycled from an old T-shirt) fused with Heat n' Bond, and I ironed the bones to the garments and then messily top-stitched them down with a free-motion quilting foot:

I took a couple of tries at this costume, and my second version was nice enough that I felt okay sending it to my niece, but I think what I really need to do is give up on my dream of fabric applique and buy some heat-transfer vinyl for the bones. 

I LOVE fabric applique, but the heat-transfer vinyl that I used for this Jack-o-lantern T-shirt made the finished garment look soooo nice and tidy! 

Mr. Craft Knife also drew this cutesy Jack-o-lantern face--he made a spooky one, too, but I only had enough orange T-shirt on hand to sew one doll shirt, and the cutesy face won! 

This is my first time trying heat-transfer vinyl and I nailed it on the first try, which means that the next five times I use it something will go terribly wrong for reasons that I will not be able to determine. 

The Sweet Valentine Dress from Doll Fashion Studio is tied with the skeleton costume as my favorite of these Halloween outfits:

I bought this cartoon Haunted Mansion fabric as a remnant once upon a time (I miss you, Joann!!!) with no plans other than to enjoy how cute it is, and happily, it also turned out to be just enough fabric for this dress for my niece, who LOVES herself some Disneyland!

I love how simple and classic this dress design is, though, so... yeah, I already have two more dresses cut out and waiting on my sewing room table. 

And of course, it's not a complete set of Halloween outfits without a witch costume!

The cape is the fleece cape from Bombshell Bling. Sewing the stretchy velvet to woven quilting cotton wasn't the most fun, but I got it figured out and I'm pretty happy with it. The hat is a paid pattern from Pixie Faire, but I hesitate to recommend it because I had to alter it quite a lot to get the cone and brim to match. The geometry just wasn't geometry-ing!

While I was finishing up these outfits, I also whipped up a big doll mask order from my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, and so I decided to multi-task refreshing some of those stale listing photos while I photographed these outfits. 

And that's why some of my doll mask photos are now a little bit Halloweeny!

Oops, I missed a couple of threads! Oh, well--that's how my customer knows it's truly handmade, I guess.

Fun fact: etsy recently updated some of its policies to ban AI slop, but it's doing it by WAY overshooting what's actually necessary, to the extent that shops will now be required to include one completely unedited photo in every listing.

Like... what?

If I had to include one completely unedited photo in this blog post, here's what that would look like, lol!

At least in my case, the editing is what makes the photo accurately represent my product!

Ugh, whatever. It's not like life isn't already just an endless succession of nonsensical hoops to jump through, anyway.

Oof, that sounded mean and depressed--must be time to soothe my perimenopausal rage by sewing those doll dresses I cut out earlier. Orrrrrr I could go to the gym and yell at the college boy trying to hog the leg press. Doesn't even matter which one, because there's always someone!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!