Easy Crafts with Fall Leaves 🍁

some simple ideas to enjoy nature

Hello! It’s becoming peak autumn for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere who have four seasons. As a former Floridian, colorful foliage felt like the stuff of fairytales until I got to see it as an adult. The stories were true. If you don’t live somewhere with changing leaves, I highly recommend prioritizing a leaf-peeping trip to an uncrowded destination each year if you can—even if it means camping in tents!—because it’s just so unbelievable that we get to live in a world where nature looks like a rainbow for a month. (Spring is shockingly colorful, too.)

Here are some simple crafts that you can do with any leaves (even plain green ones.)

Headbands

I’ve felt a bit intimidated by fall leaf headbands that are made with sewing, stapling, or folding leaves in a special way, but my 8-year-old came up with the best method I’ve seen yet: put tape in a loop, sticky-side out, and stick leaves onto it. We used painter’s tape.

How easy is that? Getting the size just right is a bit tricky, but kids can absolutely make these for themselves and their friends.

Leaf Stamping

Since this is a messy craft, I suggest bringing a cardboard box outside to be your painting table. Paint leaves, place them on paper, then roll over the leaves to get the imprint of their veins. Some tips:

• Bring cardboard outside to be your painting table.

• Paint the side of the leaf where the veins are most pronounced; we used the back side of the leaves.

• Only use a little bit of paint; too much will make it hard to see the individual veins.

• Use the paint bottles themselves as rollers to keep it extra simple 😎

Bonus: Ghost Leaves

While painting leaves, why not paint some of them white and make little ghosts? We did a layer of glow-in-the-dark paint after the white, and it kind of worked. You could also paint orange leaves as jack-o-lanterns!

Another Bonus: Paint the Box

And, while in the painting mood, encourage your kids to go ahead and paint the box you brought out too 😅 Cardboard and paint are a great combo in general. My kids made a really cool color gradient on their box.

Leaf-Preserving

There are a bunch of different ways to preserve leaves. We experimented with four of them last fall, and here’s how they’re doing this year.

From left to right, they were:

A) Soaked in glycerin.
B) Pressed inside a book for a month or so.
C) Ironed between sheets of wax paper with a hair straightener.
D) Laminated. (You could also use contact paper.)

Our favorite method overall seemed to be the simplest: press inside a book. But it’s fun to try different methods and see which is your favorite!

Beeswax Leaves

Here’s another leaf preservation method: dip leaves in beeswax!

I think the easiest way to do this is to choose a heat-safe bowl that will be reserved for crafting, put it in a crock pot, fill the crock pot with water, and turn it on high. Put beeswax in the crock pot—I used pellets from Amazon—and after a few hours, you’ve got melted wax ready for dipping leaves into! Lay them out on wax paper to dry. Maybe even make a garland out of them!

This was our setup before the wax melted:

There are a lot of crafts you can do with beeswax; we’ll probably reserve a whole week for beeswax crafts in the next couple months 😉

Botanical Pumpkins

If you don’t feel like carving pumpkins this year, hand your kids some Mod Podge and a paintbrush and tell them to go wild. (Maybe show them some inspiration first; you do not need to paint the pumpkin white, though.) Ferns look really cool on pumpkins.

Nature Collage

With sticks, torn leaves, and paper, you can make a miniature little tree! (See also: our posts on bean mosaics and foraged art.)

I hope these ideas spark some imagination for you. And I hope you spend a lot of time being in awe like a little kid again this fall. :)

Warmly,

Hope from Family Scripts