and the leaves started falling so I started crafting…..

We are blessed to have two huge trees in our front yard that shed pretty yellow colored leaves each fall.  My girls really love the leaves because they look like the “star leaves” from the kids movie Land Before Time.  They call them dinosaur leaves.  Well they have begun changing and falling, and even though our entryway now has a warm fall painting (from my previous post) I decided it was still too empty.  The girls and I went out one day last week and picked a bunch of pretty yellow leaves and brought them inside and pressed them all morning and through nap time between wax paper under very heavy books.  While they were napping I got out my paraffin wax melter I had gotten at a garage sale for 5 dollars brand new never used (great for feet and hands)  and I melted some paraffin wax so it was ready to go when they got up. 

When they got up we used my scrapbooking heart punch and punched a heart out of the middle of half of the leaves and kept the hearts to put on the unpunched ones.

After we punched out the hearts we dipped the leaves by the stem (the girls loved doing this and giggled the whole time).  At first I let them lay on wax paper to dry until I realized that doing so made the back half of the leaf’s wax come off!  Evidently the hot wax on wax made it stick to the wax paper.   So I found just setting them on the kitchen counter was fine and when dry they came right up totally in tact.  I dipped the punched hearts (since there was no stem to keep tiny fingers safe) and then laid them directly on the unpunched leaves (previously dipped).  The hot wax was adhesive enough. 

Once they were all dry I laid them out in a pattern that I liked..

Next I took some twine from our gardening stuff and tied a single knot around each stem spacing the leaves approximately the same distance apart until they were all tied on and then I hung it in our entryway.  Now I really love how fall it looks 🙂 

Well there it is, when we were done Katie laughed and said,  “We are so silly momma, dipping leaves in wax.”  I’ll be silly with my girls any day, these memories are priceless to me. 

Thanks for reading 🙂

Johanna