Thanksgiving Tree Art

I love Thanksgiving. It's a close tie with Christmas for my favorite holiday. I love that it begins the season that can get so caught up in commercialism, gimme-gimme, and gluttony with thankfulness, family, giving, and reflection and it's our goal to continue that attitude in our home into the Christmas holiday as well.

Every year at this time, we sit down as a family and make a record of the things we are especially thankful for. It's amazing how much God has done for us each year and fun to share those memories together. Last year, we wrote each item on a link to make a paper chain that we hung in our home for several months as a great tangible reminder of those blessings (including the one baking in my belly in that photo! :)...).



This year I wanted to make something similar, but something we could save and reuse each year that would be a special holiday piece for our family. We all brainstormed and decided to make a Thanksgiving tree. So this morning, my little Bug and I sat down to start creating our tree art.
I found a 12x18" piece of plywood in the basement to use and raided my scrapbook paper file to find some pretty paper to create the scene. I used a sparkly star paper for the sky and a textured white paper for the snow. Then I cut out 5 triangles ascending in size.




I didn't want it to be perfectly triangular, so I cut various angles and layered it so it still looked balanced and worked on gluing from the bottom up. And then we topped it off with a shiny, gold star.

Little Bug helped with the gluing. We painted a light coat of Mod-Podge on the back of each piece to secure it to the plywood and paper.

I also found some word art stickers that were perfect to place underneath the tree, and spelled out "thanksgiving" at the bottom - I was shocked I had enough of each letter left! (I haven't scrapbooked in 5 years!)

After everything is set in place, I brushed a thin coat of the mod-podge (I use the clear matte kind) all over the entire picture. This seals down the edges and gives the paper a layer of protection. Once the first top layer is dry, I put another thin coat over the whole thing again, making sure to seal every edge and smooth out any air bubbles, which can be pretty tricky -- this photo is before the top layer, but on the last photo you can see mine is very imperfect, but I'm okay with that ;).

The next step is to cut out ornaments that we will use to write out our items we are thankful for to hang on our Thanksgiving tree. I cut out 15 so we can each share 3 things for the tree (we'll have to help out the little Gummi Bear this year, hehehe). The plan is to laminate the ornaments so we can write on them and then erase and reuse them each year. I may even embellish them each a little after they are laminated with a little silvery bow or something. Then they will just stick on the tree with a little piece of tape. I'm looking forward to filling our tree full of blessings this weekend so we can have this pretty and fun reminder displayed this month for us to remember and share.


Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S. My blog totally needs a makeover I know! I was hoping to get to it by now, but looks like it will be a bit...sorry for the blah look in the meantime! I will beautify it soon. ;) Does anyone even read this anyways? hahaha!