How to Make Thanksgiving Place Mats: Part 2

Video Transcript

"I'm Karina Fraley for Expert Village and we are making Thanksgiving Day place mats. These are so fun and so fast to make. They're very inexpensive and they are very simple and easy project that you might actually want to enlist your kids to make while you're in the kitchen cooking and the guys are out watching TV. You might just want to gather up all the supplies and set the kids down. You basically just have to decide how big you want your place mats. I usually make mine about 12 x 18 inches, that's the size I happen like. Again, you can decide for yourself. You can either trace an existing place mat or just use your tape measure to measure however much fabric you're going to need. And just a tip, you might want to go ahead and do the math before you go to the store, especially if you're going to the fabric store, the craft store sometime near a holiday because they do tend to be incredibly busy and the lines can be long. So just know what you're getting before, know what supplies you're going to need before you go in and then you just basically cut out however many place mats and then you get your little embellishments. I picked out these leaves; they're felt with some glitter. So you basically just peel off the paper and you just put it down wherever you think looks good. And I think that looks good. Like that. And then the next thing you do is your ribbon. You just measure out; I'm just going to tuck it under a bit. I'm not going to go all the way around the back. So then you're going to use your glue gun. And you have to be careful with the glue gun. Basically when you plug it in it gets very hot and you use these glue sticks. They're hard plastic. Well, they're not that hard, but they're medium hard plastic and you just stick them into the chamber. Once the chamber's heated, it just melts the glue and then you just pull the trigger and release some glue. And it's very easy to get burned with this. And so, this you're not going to want the kids, this might be the part that you want to help the kids with or you can also use fabric glue because fabric glue will work just as well. But definitely don't let the kids use the glue gun and you are careful as well when you're using it because I have burned myself plenty of times. The gun is hot and the glue is also very hot to the touch when it comes out. Squeeze out a line of glue and we'll just put it down. And any excess does peel off. Okay. But on felt, you're actually going to want to be careful because if you want to pull something completely off that isn't just a strip of dry glue, it will rip a hole in your felt. It doesn't, felt doesn't hold up well against the hot glue that way. And that's it, there it is. A very adorable and festive Thanksgiving Day place mat and next, I'm going to show you how to make a pinecone turkey. It is an oldie but a goody, so we'll see you in the next clip."