The Turkey Wreath Gets Sophisticated

If you’ve been on Pinterest lately, you may have seen my Thom the Turkey Tulle Wreath bringing the party. He’s still a favorite around here, and will be greeting guests at the front door… just as soon as I can replace his beak, which was squashed in last year’s move. His popularity pleases me greatly.

If you know me, you know I’m a HUGE fan of Thanksgiving and really dislike not giving it the respect it deserves before Christmas gets here. (Newsflash! I don’t hate Christmas! I just prefer to not live it for 2+ months.) It goes wayyyyy back to before the OG Respect The Turkey campaign. These feelings can probably be traced to the time I managed a Hallmark and lived Christmas 9 months out of the year.

Anyway, the point is I MADE ANOTHER TURKEY WREATH. Because YES we need two and YES we need to decorate for Thanksgiving EVEN IF the people at Home Goods looked at me like confused puppies when I asked where the Thanksgiving decor was. The first week of November. The month in which we celebrate THANKSGIVING.

It’s okay. I’m fine.

So this guy is like a sophisticated Thom The Turkey, but way easier!

Here’s whatcha need:

A wreath form
(I used a 10″ extruded foam one- the kind that’s all the way round, not flat in the front and back.) You can get these at the big craft stores or on Amazon.

*Tip- in the craft stores, the extruded foam wreaths are usually with the science fair stuff (not always) and not with the floral stuff where the real styrofoam wreaths are.

~100 pheasant feathers
I ordered these for super cheap from Amazon but you can probably find some in the craft store, too.

Leather scraps or leather lacing
You can order the leather lacing on a spool, but I found it much cheaper to buy a giant bag of leather scraps that are cut in lacing pieces, but aren’t uniform. I got it from the craft store with all the other leather supplies.

Hot glue & glue gun

To start, I wrapped my wreath in burlap because I didn’t want the white to show through. You could paint yours or wrap it in ribbon (even Duck Tape) if you don’t have or like burlap.

Then I glued a piece of leather lacing to the back of the wreath, wrapped it, and used glue to secure the other end. This is pretty self explanatory. I did that all the way around the wreath until it looked like this:

I didn’t want mine to look too perfect and tidy, so I intentionally overlapped some pieces as I worked.

Then I flipped the wreath over and began gluing the feathers.

I found that starting at the left, then the right, adding to the middle, then repeating helped me keep them evenly distributed. But don’t get too caught up in perfection.

I glued some feathers between the leather laces, some under them, and some right on top.

But I was sure to add a layer of glue over the base of all of them just to give it some extra security.

At this time, I also glued a long piece of yarn to hang it with to the center back.

Such a stunner!

And now my Thanksgiving mantel is complete. I knocked out that bunting real fast this afternoon, too. Bonus tutorial!

Step 1. Wrap around a DVD case. (I wrapped the Lion Brand Homespun 15 times, the Lion Brand Quickie 5x.)

Step 2. Pull it off and tie a ribbon about 1.5- 2 inches from the top. Make sure the top doesn’t have any of the cut ends that you started or ended with.

Step 3. Cut the bottom of the loops. 

Step 4. String and hang.

Man, I love November so hard.