Let's Gather: Thanksgiving Blog Hop

Hello! I am so glad that you stopped by today!  Welcome to Cultivate Create, Stop 1 on the Let's Gather Thanksgiving Blog Hop! I am super excited to be hosting this hop along with HollyDays Paper, Designs by Miss Mandee, Our Joy His Glory, Nikki's Nacs, and Little Brags. These ladies are all amazingly talented and have some wonderful Thanksgiving inspiration to share with us today. 

Tablescape:

I decided to do a Thanksgiving tablescape. I love to set a pretty table! It makes things so festive and special. I carried some of the elements of my fall dining room into this Thanksgiving set up, such as the dried hydrangeas, and gold and natural pumpkins. I always like to do that, using some of the same items throughout the season, but changing things up a a little as it progresses. I added in a cornucopia and more gold elements to this centerpiece. Plaid fabric pulls in all of the colors of the hydrangeas and pumpkins.  I used wooden stackable files to contain the centerpiece. 

My two favorite things about this tablescape? 1.) My wooden plate chargers I had cut by a local cabinet maker. I painted them black to give visual interest under the white plates. 

2.) The metal gift tags I used to tie the napkins. Instead of assigning seats and listing names here, I decided to hand write sentiments of the holiday. 

This wooden gather sign was meant to sit on a flat surface, but I wanted to put it in the center of my dried hydrangea wreath. I drilled a hole in the top of the sign so I could attach it to the wreath with ribbon. I hung the wreath on the mirror with plaid fabric. 

Kid Craft:

I love involving the kiddos in some of the decorating!  This pumpkin turkey is just the thing for the kids. (We made this turkey for a pumpkin decorating contest for my daughter's third grade class. But now that that is over, it is the perfect kid table decoration!)

Supplies needed:

Pumpkin

Paint

Yarn

Felt

Scrapbook paper

Googly eyes

Hot glue gun and glue.

How-to:

1. Paint pumpkin brown.

2. Cut large feathers out of scrapbook paper. Fold paper feathers in half to crease them.

3. Turn pumpkin on side and glue paper feathers to back. 

4. Glue yarn ball for face to front of pumpkin.

5. Add a beak, eyes, and a wattle made of felt. ( Yes, that red thing that hangs down from a turkey's neck is called a wattle.)

6. Enjoy your turkey!

Also, how adorable would it be to decorate your pumpkin as a pilgrim? So many possibilites!

Now head over to HollyDays Paper for Stop 2 of the Blog Hop for more Thanksgiving inspiration!

Don't miss a stop! There's heaps of Thanksgiving inspiration to go around!

2. Hollydays Paper 

3. Our Joy His Glory  

4. Designs by Miss Mandee  

5. Little Brags  

6. Nikki's Nacs  

Linking up to:

 What You Wish Wednesday

Make It Pretty Monday

Oh, Play Me Some Mountain Music

After almost ten years of marriage, two of my best friends and their families and my family were finally able to take a vacation together. We have been wanting to do this since we all first got married, and were finally able to coordinate all of our schedules to make the eight hour trek up to Gatlinburg, TN. Here are some of my favorite pictures......

Our cabin

 Smoky Mountain National Park and Cades Cove:

Gatlinburg bypass:

Halloween:

November 1st we got snow!

You can tell we weren't prepared for snow. All the kiddos have bags tied on their shoes to keep their feet from getting wet. We didn't have proper snow footwear with us. 

We took sooooo many pictures and it was hard to narrow it down to just these few. We had an amazing time! Have you ever been to Gatlinburg? What is your favorite thing to do while there?