Pumpkin Turkey Craft

Welcome to Paint and Play, a series I am participating in with some of the best kid bloggers around – Crystal from Growing a Jeweled Rose, Suja from Blog Me Mom, and Tammy from Housing a Forest. We have been exploring fun ways to use paint. This week, we will be sharing Thanksgiving and Turkey paint ideas. We made a Pumpkin Turkey Craft by painting feathers and reusing some of our leftover pumpkins. For more fun turkey craft ideas check out our Tissue Paper Turkey Craft, Scrapbook Paper Thanksgiving Turkey and Paper Roll Turkey. I found lots of great Thanksgiving activities by doing a Smart Search.

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You will need:

Trace and cut six large feathers from the back of a cereal box. I made them almost the length of the box.

Set up some Fall colored paint and the feathers on a tray for your child to paint.

I loved watching the process as my daughter painted the feathers. I thought she would paint each feather a different color, but she wanted to make “rainbow feathers.”

This will be a messy activity so you will want your child to wear a smock or play clothes. 

When the feathers are painted, they have a tendency to curl up. We put some paint bottles on them while they dried so they would dry flat. This seemed to do the trick.

When the feathers have dried, it’s time to attach them to the larger pumpkin using the pushpins. The next few steps require an adult.

Pin the feathers on to the back of the pumpkin in a fan configuration. This will require a good number of push pins to hold the feathers in place.

Carve a hole in the front of larger pumpkin near the top. The hole should be the size of  the stem of the smaller pumpkin.

Push the smaller pumpkin’s stem into the hole on the larger pumpkin. Prior to doing this, we decorated the face on the smaller pumpkin, but you can decorate after you attach it to the larger pumpkin.

To decorate the face, we glued on some googly eyes, made a beak out of twisted red and orange pipe cleaners, and added red and orange balloons for the waddle and plumage. I stuck on the pipe cleaner beak by carving small holes in the pumpkin and pushing in the beak. I attached the balloons with some push pins.

We have been keeping our turkey outside, but we have pretty mild weather here in Northern California. I would certainly bring our gobbler inside if it was going to rain.

For more Turkey and Thanksgiving paint ideas check out:

Turkey Paint Rockets             Kids Fine Motor Corn Art                      Fall Leaf Craft for Kids