Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Fun and Easy Fall Craft

I am pretty much obsessed with Fall leaves - I absolutely love them! Last year, Hunter and I collected a bunch, only to see their colors fade and watch them dry out and fall apart. This year I had a plan...

Over the last couple weeks, Hunter and I have been collecting leaves as we've been out 'n about. Once we got them home, I heated some paraffin wax in my double boiler and we dipped the leaves in the wax. We set them on a sheet of wax paper to cool (which took all of a minute). Hunter loved helping with this - we did it every day for a couple weeks and it was all he could talk about.

The wax prevents the leaves from dying out and preserves their color. The colors do darken some - they don't stay quite as vibrant, but it still works pretty well. Here's a shot of some of our leaves:
Pretty fun huh? It is a wonderfully inexpensive fall decoration. We've got our preserved leaves spread across our mantle, and I have to say, I'm very fond of it:

1 comment:

Jamie said...

That looks great! What a good idea.