Thanksgiving Napkin Rings: Book Page Turkeys

Dress up your Thanksgiving tablescape this year with these charming book page acorn turkey DIY Thanksgiving napkin rings! Your guests will love them!

When I was planning out my Thanksgiving tablescape, I wanted to come up with an original idea for a place setting or Thanksgiving napkin rings. I thought it would be cute to make an abstract turkey.  I bought these acorns that have a lovely burnt orange and gold color to them. They went perfectly with some napkins that I already had on hand. So I knew I wanted to incorporate them somehow into my napkin rings. The book pages were just a nice neutral color against the warm tones of the acorns, I didn’t want something too busy to compete with the acorns. That is how these book page acorn turkeys came to be. 🙂

*There are links to products in this post that I use or are similar to products I use. If you buy something from one of these links, I may make a small commission (with no additional cost to you) from the purchase.  I will not recommend anything that I would not buy myself. Thank you for supporting my blog!

For this project you will need:

• Book pages (pick up a book at the thrift store)
• Acorns (similar)
• Scissors
• Hot Glue Gun and Glue Sticks
• 6″ Burlap Roll
• Empty Paper Towel Roll
• Ruler

How to make DIY Thanksgiving napkin rings

These are really so easy to make that I was not even sure if I needed to do a tutorial. However I know sometimes it is helpful to see the steps laid out so I decided to do one. The first thing you need to do is take your paper towel roll and mark off of every 1.5 inches.

Cut the paper towel roll at the marks.  I just used scissors for this, it did bend down the roll a little bit but I was able to shape it back easily. Not wanting a paper towel roll napkin ring, I covered the paper towel roll rings with burlap to make them look nicer. I had a burlap roll already and this worked great. I cut a 6″ piece off of the roll, so it ended up being approximately 6 ” square. Then I cut that in half and hot glued the strip around one of the napkin rings.

Putting a bead of hot glue around the inside edge, it was easy to fold down the burlap edges into the napkin ring. The glue gets a little hot on the fingers doing this though since the hot glue can squeeze through the burlap easily. It seemed like it worked better if I let it cool just a bit before pressing the burlap down.

How to make book page acorn turkeys

Next up were the turkey feathers. I took my book pages and just cut off the white edges from around the words. Then I cut that piece in half. The size of the book page strip ended up being about 2″x 7.5″. To get the look of feathers, I did an accordion fold on the paper. Starting on one end, I folded it up 1/2″, then folded that again the opposite way back onto itself and continued this to the end of the strip.

One strip by itself was not long enough to fan out all the way like I needed so I took two strips and glued the ends together.  You can see this in the closeup picture above.

After gluing two strips together, I rounded the edges to give more of a feather look to it.

The next step was to glue the feathers onto the burlap napkin ring. Make sure to glue them down facing the same way as the opening of your napkin ring. I made the mistake of doing it the wrong way the first time. Initially I was thinking I could just cover the seam with the feathers, but that did not work out so well. 🙂 I placed them about 2/3 of the way towards the back of the ring to allow room for the acorn on the front.

Make sure you glue it on the bottom in the front and back. This will hold it upright without leaning one way or the other.

The last step was to add the acorn, which resembles the turkey’s body. I just added glue on the bottom of the acorn and pressed it straight down onto the burlap ring. I also added a touch of glue to the backside of the acorn where it met the feathers.

Show off your book page acorn turkey napkin rings!

Super easy, right? Now all that is left is to decorate with your Thanksgiving napkin rings!

I think they look great with gold napkins as well! It really brings out the gold color in the acorns.

These would also be cute to use as a Thanksgiving place setting, just leave the napkin ring out of the equation. You can kind of get the idea of how they would look from these pictures.

Here is a sneak peek of them on my Thanksgiving tablescape.

What do you think?  Do they look like turkeys?

Have a wonderful day!