Tiny Turkey Hands

My little boy is currently in a crafting/coloring frenzy phase.  Any time his sister isn’t around he breaks out his marker and asks for paper.  He loves creating little “projects” or “systems” as he sometimes calls them.  Many times during one of the two naps V still has during the day he and I will create something.  Whether it’s just plain coloring in a coloring book, creating a story, or making something for dessert he’s always a happy boy with the one on one attention and some sort of product to show his daddy when he gets home.

This week I decided to base our project off of something I did as a first grader.  So a LONG time ago I remember getting to make up my own stationary using our thumbprints to create little animals, I specifically remember making a pig.  I believe this stationary was then given to my mother as a mother’s day gift.  Anyway with all the turkey crafts out there that involve cutting which S really isn’t all that good at yet I thought this could be a cute way to make up some pictures and maybe make a card to send to the grandparents.

Well S had other ideas.

He decided he did NOT want to just use a thumbprint or a fingerprint.  What he really wanted was to do a handprint (probably because the last time we had the ink pads out we did handprints to mark 6 months for V and 3 years for S).  So I obliged and we have our craft to share:  Tiny Turkey Handprints.  Fingerprint turkeys will wait for another day.





Begin with gathering your supplies.  We used kid friendly ink pads purchased at JoAnn’s (I wish I had made another trip out before we did this craft to get brown and some other colors but we made due with black, pink, purple, and orange), cardstock, scissors, and markers/colored pencils/crayons.  Baby wipes or a wet paper towels are a handy thing to have too.



First decide what your project will be.  S wanted to make just pictures so I left the cardstock alone.  However this could easily be made into a card if you wanted to fold/cut the cardstock to the size you want.

For the ink, I stamped S’s hand first with the black on his thumb and palm.  Then we did each finger up as a colored feather.  First time we did it with each finger being a separate color.  The second time I started with the first segments of his fingers closest to his palm with one color, then the second segment with another color, and finished up with the tips of his fingers with the third color.  NOTE: If you are going to do multiple colors on the fingers I recommend NOT doing the thumb/palm until last AND starting with the lightest color and moving to the darkest as there may be transfer of ink between the pads as you ink up the hand.

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Press hand firmly on to the cardstock.  Making sure your little one actually puts their palm all the way down too (ask me how I know this… we had a few turkeys that were just tail feathers).

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Now that the hand print is done.  Quick clean up before you have handprints all over your house!  Love how clean these inks clean up!

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Add an eye, a beak, and wattle (the red dangly thing).  You can also outline with a black marker to bring out the features.



For one of our pictures I added a background per what S asked for/told me the turkey was doing- he tried to tell me the turkey was eating some ham but then we talked about what turkeys eat so then he decided on seeds.  Then we added some of the things he was grateful for.  Insta-fridge material!

Gobble Gobble!
Viever