Turkey Shirts

One of this weekends projects (there were a few) are tukey shirts for my little turkeys to wear on Thanksgiving. Now, I don't have photos of the turkeys wearing the turkeys yet becuase I'm not letting them wear the shirts until the actual holiday. Seriously, it would be nice for them to have nice, stain free shirts just once in a while.

The inspiration (pinspirsation?) for these shirts came from http://thecottagehome.blogspot.com/2010/11/gobble-gobble-turkey-shirt-tutorial.html This blog provides a great easy to follow tutorial for making turkey shirts.

I did have a problem getting the template for the body and feathers to print. I ended up sizing the image on the computer screen to be the same size as a sheet of paper and then lightly traced it using a pencil. What did I think of this process? Brilliant! Why didn't I think of this before? You could use your computer monitor as a "light box" and make templates of everything. This is totally going to come in handy when I make the little people their quiet books.

Here are the supplies


There just wasn't a good way to take a picture of all the crap, I mean stuff i needed to make these shirts so you'll just need to pretend this picture is amazing. And yes, to answer your question, that is a glass of wine in the background. It was Friday and the kids were sleeping, don't judge.
Becuase the tutorial did such a great job of explaining the process I don't really think I need to tell you everything again. I mean after all, you got here so you can probably read and follow a link. If not, ask your toddler, they'll help. Instead I'm just going to share my lessons/things I learned from this project.

1. I totally need to organize my scrap fabric. What a mess!

2. Everyone has different ideas about what colors turkey feathers should be. I had some help picking these colors out. All I knew is that they were not going to be brown. I had lots of pinks, but there wasn't enough contrast to do all pink feathers for Little Princess. Little Man's was supposed to have some blue in it but I honestly don't know what happened to that fabric-it is in the picture but didn't make it to the shirt.

3. When using fusible interfacing don't use your good iron.

4. You can't iron felt, it will melt on your iron.

5. You can use dryer sheets to get a bunch of guck off your iron. It worked really well for the melted fusible interfacing. Just rub the dryer sheet on the hot iron and it actually comes right off. Just be careful you don't burn your fingers. Most of the melted felt came off the iron, it just took several dryer sheets. I still have some residue but I'm going to try Goo Gone to get that off. I love that stuff-Goo Gone, not melted felt.

6. My smoke detector goes off when I bake something but not when my iron, which is much closer to the detector, gets all smokey becuase of melted felt and dryer sheets. That worries me.

7. This project is pretty quick. Unless...

• You have to make two. God bless those mom's with more than two babies. I mean I can handle twins but if you were to add a third, I just don't think I could do it. And what if I had 8? That would be a lot of turkey shirts.



• There is a very exciting football game on TV. Now really, I don't much care about football and I really only thought I would turn it on, see we were getting our butts handed to us, and then move on to something on the Food Network. Nope, had to watch the whole game. And there were points when using a hot iron or a sharp scissors was not a good idea. So, once again I learned that crafting in front of the tv takes much longer than crafting in a quiet space. Quiet space in my house? Ha! That made me laugh.



• You have two helpers who want to help you with the hand sewing.

8. There are some great tutorials on YouTube on how to make french knots. I used french knots for the eyes and simple embrodery for the beak and legs. I did have to tie off between the face and the legs or the tension got all goofy and the legs didn't work.

9. Sitting in the van in the driveway is a great place to get the hand sewing done. The little people were not having a nap on Saturday so I tricked them by taking them for a ride. Well, if I tried to get them out of the van they were going to wake up, so I just sat with them in the driveway. It was actually pretty nice. I got Little Princesses shirt finished and got to read my Food Network magazine.

10. I could totally sell these shirts. They are way stinking cute. Unfortunatly those sales would involve a lot more work than I am willing to put into things. Plus, making turkey shirts is fun. If it became a job it would be work. But if you need a turkey shirt, just let me know, we can work something out.

But here if the final product. The shirts I used were just plain white turtlenecks from Wal-Mart. I will post pictures of the turkeys in the turkey shirts later in the week.