Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Happy Thanksgiving to you all!  

If you're one of my American readers, you can happily get back to your lovely Thanksgiving Day!  International readers, I'll fill you in about how our Thanksgiving will be going!  

Today we are making cheese balls and heading up to my Aunt's house for Thanksgiving lunch...which often starts between 10:00 am and 11:30 depending on if my 99 year old Great Grandpa is there (he likes his lunch reaaallly early haha).  

This will be the first time Tyler is attending a major holiday with my extended family, so that's exciting!

Believe it or not, we've already had one Thanksgiving this week at church!  And it already snowed here!

I had a lot of fun drawing this sign for the Thanksgiving party we had (where we also played Christmas music and I saw someone wearing a Santa Hat).  We might have been celebrating all the holidays rolled together as one this time of year, but I don't think that makes us any less thankful!  

Can you tell our church is held in a middle school? lol

I also used our church congregation as test dummies for the cheese balls I am also bringing today in preparation for my (most likely) pickier family!  It was a success at church, so I'm sure it will be fine today!  We made a Bacon Jalapeno Cheese Ball and a Pineapple Pecan Cheese Ball.  Yum.  Cheese Balls are one of my favorite things.

So after we are done today, we'll likely drive up to where Tyler's parents live and spend some time with them for the holiday.  I'm not sure yet what's in store for that (as I'm sure you know I scheduled this post earlier this week).

Thanks for reading, and even if you live somewhere where Thanksgiving isn't celebrated, I wish you a happy time to be Thankful for family, friends, and life!

"Give Thanks" Free Printable and Decoration

Today, I'm showing you the beginning of what I'm hoping will be a year long project I've been working on to celebrate each holiday in one decoration.

I came across an old 5x7 frame that I sanded down.  I wanted to have some seasonal decoration in our home, but I didn't want to have to change the piece that was on the wall every time.  That's when I decided to make a new drawing to fit in the same frame for each holiday or season.  I started with Christmas (which you'll finally get to see here in a few weeks), and last week I finished Thanksgiving.  

I have been using Bristol Vellum - I like that it is smooth to work with, but is a very sturdy paper.  

Using pencil first, I tested out the fonts I wanted to use and wrote them with a calligraphy pen.  I colored in the "thanks" with orange colored pencil.

The difficult part was figuring out how to make the foliage frame the font and still look whimsical.

After drawing everything out with pencil, I outlined with a fine point sharpie, and colored in with colored pencil.

And here's my "Give Thanks" sign in the frame!  Now, all that's left is to figure out where to hang my frame!

So from my hands to yours (literally), I decided to scan and edit my accidental coffee stain off the paper so you can hang this up in your home!  This printable is set to print as a 5x7.

Download Printable HERE!

This will be my first printable, so let me know if you have any suggestions for making the downloading experience better!  Please be aware that because this was originally hand drawn, the pixilation and imperfections will be more than a computer generated printable.