Leaf Me Alone!

Okay, don't. Even though you'll probably want to after that bad pun...

So, this week I've been using leaves from the great outdoors to help with some craft projects!

First, I picked some leaves from a bunch of different trees/plants/bushes/weeds in our garden:

Then, I traced around them onto some paper and added some veins:


Then, using my light box, I traced them onto a 100% cotton blouse with a washable marker. A couple days later I painted over those lines with some soy wax, and today I dyed it! Here's the result:

Just put it in my shop!

What do you all think? I wish that I had maybe used a darker green, because then there would be more contrast with the white and the leaves would show up better, but I'm pretty pleased.

I could have just left the stencils to use later, but I decided to color them in... basically just because there was a box of crayons sitting on the kitchen table:

Not sure what I'll do with those yet... but I think they'd make a cool print or poster or something!

The last thing I have for you is this... I was outside with my nephew, Geordie, and he found a cool leaf with a hole in it that he immediately put up to his face and peeked through. I took the leaf, traced around it, colored it in, and turned it into a mask! He wore it for most of the day and seemed to like it a lot. I'm sure a similar thing could be done with felt and fabric paint, which would be more durable.