I was skimming through a few of the blogs I haunt and over on Going Home to Roost, Bonnie threw out an idea which I really thought would be fabulous for our Thanksgiving Day table. I have a few more days to get this all pulled together since we’re not having the big turkey dinner until Saturday, but if you’ve got older kids joining you, this is something you could have them work on as well while you’re cooking up a storm.

I first printed out the stencils on regular paper, then glued them to a piece of poster board to make some stencils. If you want, I’m sure you could print the designs directly on the colored paper. I’ve provided a few PDF files below to get you started with leaf designs.

Since I’ve made the leaves in a couple of sizes, my next objective was to fit as many leaves on one piece of paper as possible. You can select the shapes you like or what you think will work best for the (little) people doing the cutting. I didn’t get too crazy about all the little details on the edges, just let myself get a little funky with some of the edges when I wanted to.

I actually managed to cut the shapes out of 4 pages of paper at once. It certainly helped me keep my sanity a bit…going page by page would get really mind numbing. So the more people you can recruit to do this job, the better.

I even pulled out my sparkle pens and wrote on a few leaves. This one says “thankful” even though you can’t read it to well in the photo. You could make these into place cards or just write Thanksgiving thoughts, words of happiness or the names of the people you are celebrating with.

Here’s what the table will more or less look when you’ve got your leaves cut out. I also added some little freehand acorns just to use up more of the pretty colored papers. I think I will try out a few additional colors as well. I’m just using a package of colored paper we picked up at IKEA, but I also thought of doing this with scrap booking paper. I just didn’t have anything I thought would really work well for this particular evening.

So there you go. Just a quick little extra something to decorate your Thanksgiving table with this year. Don’t forget to crumple up the leaves a bit as you’re throwing them down to give it a more leaf-like look.

You can download the leaf stencils I threw together here: Leaf stencils 1 and Leaf stencils 2