Is anyone else surprised that Thanksgiving is next week?!?!? How is that even possible? I'm so not ready. Maybe it's that fact that the weather is off (it was 87* this weekend) or that I've been sick the past few days. All I know is I have a huge to do list to complete in preparations for the holiday. Instead of working on cleaning, shopping and menu planning, my little artist and I worked on some Fall decor. I thought I would share our projects in case you needed something to keep your little pilgrims busy this week. Both of these took no time at all to set up and complete, but they were a huge hit with my three year old. Plus I think they turned out super cute!! Who knew that Q-tips make the perfect paint brushes for small hands. First up we worked on making Indian Corn. Here's what we used: Crayola Washable paint vanilla cardstock Q-tips (I put out regular and baby sized) paper bag ribbon All you do is cut the cardstock in the shape of a corn. Then you dip the top of the Q-tip in the paint and make random dots all over your paper. Told you it was easy. I had her make dots until she couldn't see any more paint. That way we had different shades of the same color. She used all of the colors once. I encouraged her to spread the dots all over until she couldn't see anymore paper underneath. Once she used all of the colors once, I let her mix the paints and come up with new shades. Once it was dry, I took a small paper bag and cut our some husk shapes. I gave them to C and let her crumble them up to give them a good aged, weathered look. We then glued them to the top and added a decorative ribbon. I love how they turned out and they will make some cute, handmade additions to our Thanksgiving decor. Since we already had the paints and Q-tips out, I decided to go ahead and use them to make a pretty Fall tree. We used the same paints and Q-Tips. I grabbed one of the trees we used for this project and simply glued it to a piece of cardstock. I then told her to add as many colorful Fall leaves to the branches as she could. I was stunned with the outcome!!! She followed the branches to begin with and had fun adding leaves and mixing colors. She then started filling in the space between the branches creating a beautiful Fall tree. The trees are still green and holding on to their leaves here in Texas so this might be the closest I get to a stunning Fallish tree. I love that she added some falling leaves and a few on the ground. As she was painting, she started telling me that she was making Fletcher's favorite tree! Fletcher and the Falling Leaves was one of the books we shared in our Fall Booklist a few weeks ago. It's an incredibly cute story. I was excited that she remembered it and applied it to this project. The only thing she asked me to do was create a hole in the tree for Fletcher to live in. Q-tip painting! We will definitely be doing this technique again in the future. While you are here, be sure to check out our Thanksgiving Booklist. We also worked on some turkey projects, but I will save those to share later this week. Good luck with those holiday preparations!