Thankful Banner~ Easy Thanksgiving Craft

Thankful Banner~ Easy Thanksgiving Craft

Now that Halloween is over, it is time to move on to Thanksgiving!  I love fall and Thanksgiving.  I love that even though I may not take as many opportunities through out the year as I should to express my gratitude for my many blessings that there is a whole month set aside for us to get to focus on just that.  I wanted to create a little reminder for not only myself, but for my kids to see also.  Something that would help them to focus on their blessings as well.  So, here is how to make your own “Thankful banner”.

You will need:

Card stock in Autumn colors (I used 4 colors with 2 on a sheet, but you could easily fit at least one more leaf on each sheet if you wanted to)

Scissors

Glue

Thread

Here is a template of the leaf.  This is a full sheet of printer paper, I think if you right click on the photo, you should be able to print it out so that your template is the same size that I used.  This is my first time trying a printable though, so let us know if it doesn’t work that way!

**UPDATE:  right click on the image, save it to your computer, and then when you print it , it will be the correct size.  Sorry about that!

This is just to give you something to trace on to your paper to cut out your leaf shapes from.  Use it to cut out 8 leaf shapes.

Find a font you like on your computer, and print out your letters the desired size.  You don’t need any special programs for this, just Word should work.  If you print them with a black outline, and no fill, then you can have white letters.  Another color would also be pretty if you aren’t sure how to do that.

Once your leaves and  letters are cut out, get your pattern in the order you wish the colors to go in.  Do this now so that you don’t accidentally pick up the wrong color and glue a letter on that you didn’t want to go there.  I chose to glue my letters on leaning different directions.  That way I could have my leaves each laying differently yet my letters would still be upright.  I didn’t put a whole lot of thought in to how they were laying, just wanted them to not all be straight.

Now take your thread and cut off a piece.  I chose to use longer sections so I could tie it easier.  Then I just clipped it off the length I wanted it.  Poke a very small hole with the tip of your scissors where you want the thread to go in.

If you have one of those little, tiny hole punches you could use that to make it a cleaner hole.  I don’t, and I didn’t want to punch a large hole. Once your leaves are tied together, trim your thread.  Don’t forget to hang a piece of thread off of the first and last letters so you have something to hang it by.