Countdown to Thanksgiving - Easy Centerpiece Ideas

If you're looking for easy ways to jazz up your Thanksgiving table, I came up with a few easy and possibly free (depending on what you have on hand) ideas.

1. Leftover pumpkins from Halloween. If you have any small pumpkins left from Halloween or have found them on clearance recently, they make great centerpieces! I had several leftover, plus I was given a few recently, so I used them as my focal point. There are lots of options with pumpkins. You paint them, write on them, or leave them plain. You could even have your guests write what they're thankful for on the pumpkins!
2. Use cake stands or cupcake towers to display on. I put my pumpkins and some leaves on my glass cupcake stand that comes apart. The variation of size makes it visually interesting. You could use just one or multiples. They are great for displaying candles, pumpkins, leaves, gourds, or whatever else you think up.
   
   
   
3. Fill jars with acorns, painted or all natural. We went acorn picking a while back at one of our local parks filled with Oak trees and came home with a grocery bag full of acorns. Once we baked them to get all the critters out, we just ended up putting them in jars around the house. They were pretty, but I wanted get a little more creative with some of them. I ran across this blog about painting acorns on Pinterest. This would be a great project to do with kiddos! We just used some acrylic craft paint we had on hand. They turned out beautiful if I do say so myself!
4.  Scatter some leaves and candles in the center of the table. If you are looking for a very basic centerpiece, this would be the easiest! I just grabbed a couple things of fake leaves at the dollar store and then cut them off the stems. You could then scatter any size combination of candles on top of the leaves. Or, if you want to get really creative, you could cut holes in gourds or apples and pop in tea lights, like they do here.

I ended up doing a combination of most of the above. The important thing is to get your creative on and have fun with it!

We will posting our final Countdown to Thanksgiving post tomorrow!

Countdown to Thanksgiving - Give Thanks Banner Craft

Donald and I are pretty excited about our first Thanksgiving as clean eaters and as bloggers! We decided that we wanted to do a count down to Thanksgiving. That means every day for the next week we will be posting a Thanksgiving themed blog post! It will vary between crafts, recipes, and ways to incorporate clean eating into your traditional Thanksgiving fare.

We're kicking off with a simple craft to liven up your dining room! I'm sure some of you already have beautifully decorated dining rooms, but I'm certainly not one of them. My poor walls are bare and in desperate need of some love. When we moved to Nevada last year, we downsized majorly and got rid of almost all of our stuff to cut down on moving costs. That meant we had a whole house to furnish when we moved into our own place in August. We picked things like couches instead of art for the walls (necessities, you know ;) So as I planned my Thanksgiving menu and started thinking about how I wanted to decorate my table, I realized that my walls needed some kind of spice!

I searched through Pinterest, but didn't see anything that particularly struck my fancy. So I came up with something of my own. I had made this kind of flag banner for a baby shower and knew how cute they looked. This time I wanted to add letters and do it in a Fall colored them however. I did a quick trip to Michael's and was very happy that everything I wanted was on sale.

(By the way, I'm sure you will noticed the lovely green carpet in several of these pictures. Yeah. That's the color of my carpet. >_<)

What you need:

Scrapbook Paper
Stick-on Letters or Letter Stencil
Tape or Glue Dots
String
Scissors
Ruler
Pen/Pencil

I started by drawing a triangle with the ruler to figure out what size I wanted. I decided on 6 inches for each of the long sides.

Draw and cut out the model triangle from a piece of scratch paper.

Then flip over the scrapbook paper to the back side and trace the triangle on to it. I was able to get about 6 triangles out of each 12x12 piece of scrapbook paper.

After the triangles were cut out, I attached the stick on letters. I decided to have my banner say, "Give Thanks."

Lay out the triangles in the order you wanted them, then keeping in that order, flip upside down. I did two banners; one that said "Give" and the other saying "Thanks!"

Once the triangles are laid out upside down, run your string along the top of each and tape in place. I had glue dots left over from a project, so I used a combination of glue dots and tape.

And with that, your done. All that's left is to hang it up on your wall. I just tied it to some thumb tacks to hang it.

My dining room is not the most well-lit place, so it made it hard to get a good picture. But I guarantee, it looks awesome in person! I put a little leaf wreath below it to add a little more interest to the huge wall it's hanging on.

I hope this provides you with some crafty Thanksgiving inspiration! Please check back tomorrow for a very unique Thanksgiving recipe as we continue our Countdown to Thanksgiving!