Fall Leaf Wreath

I’m not sure how it came about, but making wreaths from scratch has become one of my favourite DIYs in recent years. I love coming up with an idea  and seeing it come to fruition – sometimes better than I’d planned.

I spent about 20 minutes gathering these leaves from the local park. They all came from the same tree, so they were the same general shape, but they had a good variance of colour, which I liked. I divided my pile in half, and set one half aside.

Then I got out my craft paint and paint brushes.

Then I started painting the other half of the leaves. Nothing too elaborate or detailed – just something to make the leaf still interesting to look at once it’s shriveled and turned brown.

I did this for a while.

Like, an hour or so.

My favourites are the ones I painted with glitter paint, so the leaf colour shines through but then the light catches on the glitter and they’re just lovely.

Then I cut out a half-assed circle from some scrap cardboard. Yep, that’s freehand. No sense in being perfect on something that doesn’t need to be perfect.

While the painted leaves were drying, I took my hot glue gun and started attaching the unpainted leaves to the cardboard ring.

I tried to line it up mostly along the edges, with the larger leaves on the outside and smaller ones on the inside.

Then I filled in the centre a bit, because I knew the leaves would get wrinkly as they dried up over time.

Then I started inserting the painted leaves under and over and around.

Finally got every single one on there.

The whole thing, in poor lighting.

A snippet of one side, for the detail.

I tacked it to my front door, which is sheltered from the elements. I’m interested to see how it’s going to look in a week or two once the leaves go brown – you can see that just after one day they’re starting to curl already. I’ll add a photo when it gets there.

 

***EDIT***

And here it is, fully shriveled. I like how it turned out!