A fun fall tradition is to make hand print turkey pumpkins with your children. This craft is easy to make with paint and a pumpkin!
Yesterday Annabelle and I went to a pumpkin painting party at one of my friend’s homes. Emily is one of the first Mommy friends I made after having Annabelle. She has a son Grayson who is only a few months younger than A!
For Mother’s Day, we made LOVE signs with the baby’s hand prints. Emily thought it would be fun to commemorate the baby’s first Halloween/Thanksgiving with hand print turkeys on tiny pumpkins. She had acrylic paint, paint brushes, baby wipes (ESSENTIAL FOR CLEAN-UP), and baby pumpkins for all the babies.
With all hand print crafts, I think it’s necessary to have two adults. One adult holds the baby while the other adult paints the hand. I’ve tried to do it alone and we ended up with nothing but a big mess. Last time we make handprint crafts together, Annabelle let us paint her hand pretty easily. This time, however, we had to get her to wave so she would open her hand at first.
Poor A had a cold (and had a fever), but she was a trooper! After some coaxing we were able to get her to open her hand and slap the pumpkin.
We let her slap the pumpkin, but I then held her hand down and Emily rolled the pumpkin underneath it, so we would get a five finger handprint. The other babies’ handprints didn’t come out as well, and their turkeys ended up with fluffy feathers.
Baby wipes are your best friend during crafting time. They clean up baby hands so quickly and easily! The brown paint did get stuck under Annabelle’s nails, but they were long and we just clipped them after bath time in the evening.
This is one of those crafts that will unfortunately not last forever. I will definitely be making another handprint turkey – but on a canvas!
This is so amazing!! I want to do this with my niece this week!
I was thinking about how you said that it unfortunately can’t be saved and next time you’ll use a canvas, but….we can buy fake pumpkins at the craft store and make it on that! Because I think that the hand print with the bow on the pumpkin is just the cutest thing!! 🙂
Ah Alyssa what a fantastic idea!! See – I am not a craft girl and totally didn’t even think how EASY it would be to use a fake pumpkin! Maybe I shall make one of those too…. =0)
Cute! I thin my 4 month old son would have too much fun discovering the texture of pain! He loves touching new things.