The Making Of The Napkins

Preparations for turkey day continued today, and because apparently I didn't have enough on my to-do list, I decided that this morning would be a good time for a craft project with the kids. For weeks now, ever since discovering my stash of fabric paint left over from last year's holiday crafting, BB has been asking about doing something with said fabric paint. We settled on the idea of decorating fabric napkins, but finding inexpensive plain white napkins for that project turned out to be more challenging than I'd anticipated.

And then our attention turned to other things, and I mostly forgot about it. In all honesty, I was sort of hoping she'd forget about it too; I've just not been in the mood to mess with the mess involved. But a few days ago, she brought it up again. "Can we paint napkins for Thanksgiving, Mommy?" And then she asked yet again this morning. OK, I decided. She's not going to let this one drop. Better to do it now than have to fit it in tomorrow morning!

I still didn't have napkins to use, but I remembered that I did have some white fabric leftover from making the bathroom curtain. White on white swirls, which wasn't what I'd initially had in mind, but better than nothing. Didn't have time to hem up a dozen napkins, so I brought out the pinking shears and went to work. Good thing I'd warned people we were doing a casual thanksgiving, eh? We'd officially reached the "Something Is Better Than Nothing" stage of planning. (Besides, I figured that if they turned out great I could always run up hems later!)

Both kids had also been talking about wanting to do apple printing (thanks to a book from the library checked out for the "apple week" at BJ's preschool) so I decided to take care of both at the same time. I got out the fabric paint, cut out some apple stamps by halving an apple horizontally, added in some corks to use for circle stamps, and let the kids go to town.


Between the brushes, the stamps, the fabric markers, and some hand prints, we ended up with some very interesting napkins. I made four and the kids each made four as well. Want to guess whose is whose?

Top left (blackish brown blob) is BJ's interpretation of a turkey. Top right is BJ's stamps. Bottom is BB's.All three of these are BB's. The girl loves doing handprints! The middle one is her drawing of Cinderella -- which was a point of some contention in that BJ made it clear that he did NOT want to use a Cinderella napkin. It was decided that this would be BB's special napkin and he wouldn't have to have anything to do with it.

After doing stamps and the turkey, BJ settled on another holiday themed image. Want to speculate about what this red blob is supposed to be?

Cranberry sauce atop a table, of course. I have to say, I'm interested to see the reaction of whomever ends up with that particular napkin tomorrow.

And for his fourth design, BJ settled on the old preschool standby image:

Yes, a rainbow. I find I can't get too worried about his antipathy towards princesses (which has, admittedly, come on rather suddenly) so long as he has such a fascination with painting rainbows. Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I tell myself that his perception of the world can't have become too overly gendered if he's still loving rainbows.

And here are some of mine hanging up to dry because we ran out of places to lay things out...
All told, the project ended up being much more fun than I'd expected. It helped enormously that S was around to assist with herding the kids, making sure fabric paint didn't end up all over the carpet, and scrubbing up paint covered hands before they started grabbing anything and everything!

After all that anticipation, I was glad to see that BB was quite satisfied to have finally made the napkins. Sometimes the actuality isn't as cool as the imaginary, ya know. But after we'd spread out everything to dry and put away the paint, she went full-out into decoration mode, festooning the kitchen with shoelaces and beads from her lacing toys, all the while saying, "Look, Mommy! I'm decorating! Isn't it pretty?"

Good thing she wasn't attached to the idea of her decorations becoming permanent, since opening the cabinets involved removing and then replacing all her carefully assembled objects. We left them up for a while, which satisfied her. Plus it kept her busy while I was working in the kitchen, which was definitely a bonus, because I had a lot to do!

I'm so thankful to have such fun, creative children. Not to mention my wonderful partner who helps me keep the chaos at a manageable level even when he's under a lot of stress himself. I'll muse more on gratitude tomorrow, after we're done with the frenzy of cooking and feasing. For tonight suffice to say that I wish an early happy Thanksgiving to all you folks who will be observing the holiday tomorrow. May your day be full of fun and a bounty of blessings. I'm feeling like a very tired, blessed mommy myself tonight. And it's a good feeling! I hope you're feeling something similar, too.