Embossed Tin Leaves

The cold weather has settled here in my neck of the woods. Well, it settled a few weeks ago and then vanished and summer returned! But it is back again, and this time I do believe it will stay.

We are in fact having that early Fall weather that includes layering up and starting the woodstove first thing in the frosty morning, and then peeling off layers and inevitably opening windows to cool things down by late afternoon. Oh Canada.

Anyways, we also have a plethora (gosh I love that word right now) of Fall leaves blowing our way. It turns out our new little lambs eat those Fall leaves like potato chips, but luckily (due to the plethora) we still have plenty to craft with.

Have you seen our little Mabel and Poppy lately? Well, if you insist:

Seriously — ridiculously cute, right?! I can’t even believe we have sheep. I do believe that pushed us across some sort of an imaginary farmers line I have created.

Chickens, sure … but sheep? We might be slightly out of our league.  In fact, we have turned them into puppies for the most part. They are super friendly, leash trained, and so snuggly. So I suppose we brought them into our league. Farm animals? Nope – we stick to pets.

While they might be puppies when it comes to training, they are piggies when it comes to those leaves!

We have managed to snag quite a few pretty leaves over the past few weeks before our girls got to them. I had been eager to try this technique I saw on Cassie Stephens blog. The post is called: Leaf Relief.

The idea was super simple (which you know I love). We snuck some pretty leaves from our lambs, and glued them onto cardstock with the back of the leaf facing up.

We then gently pressed tinfoil (or aluminum foil perhaps, depending on your neck of the woods) over top of the leaves. We could then see the outline, spine, and even the veins of the leaves.

This was a little bit tricky for my 5 year old, but by 7 year old managed it all on his own.

Afterwards, we added some paint to help the leaf outline really show up.

To our varying interests, creativity, and ability levels of course.

Cassie offers a few suggestions over on her blog for making the embossed leaf show up even better. We kept it nice and simple and it made a fabulous kids craft.

It turned into a lovely way to spend a Saturday afternoon! Maybe it will be a nice memory maker for you and your little munchkins too.

Thank you so much for reading – I hope you are having an amazing week!