Being an autumn baby, Roo has recently celebrated her fifth birthday. Now she is learning to write, the ensuing ‘thank you’ cards are becoming more Roo’s responsibility than ours. Luckily at this stage the writing bit it still a novelty not a chore!
Despite Roo’s new enthusiasm for writing, the most fun bit of ‘thank you’ cards for both Roo and Beth is making them. It’s a chance to raid the craft drawer and make a massive, vacuum-defying mess of paint, glue and sparkles.
This time we went with an autumnal theme, choosing to make a leaf print card. We raided the basket Roo had been carefully collecting in recent weeks of pretty fallen leaves and cracked open the gold paint I’d found on offer in the supermarket and put away with vague ideas about Christmas.
The cards were super simple to make and the result was pretty pleasing. Even Beth was able to manage doing prints of smaller leaves unaided. Roo also got to get out the much coveted tubes of glitter to finish off her cards – bonus!
I reckon theses autumnal leaf print cards would work equally well as Christmas cards if you used ivy leaves to do the printing instead and used festive colours, or maybe white/silver paint on dark blue. They would also work really nicely as a fun and crafty autumn poster project on leaf identification. In fact, that may well be our next project…!
The cards were pretty straightforward to make but here’s how we did it:
What you need:
- Card.
- Paint. We found gold poster paint made the cards feel extra special!
- Paintbrush
- Dry leaves. Any flat leaves with good, defined veins work well. Interesting shapes work the best.
- Glitter (optional)
What to do:
- Fold and cut your card to the right size for your greetings card. Make sure to check that the leaf you are printing with will fit on the card before cutting!
- Paint the back of a leaf with a good layer of paint. It’s important you use the back of the leaf as that way you will get the details of all the leaf’s veins printed onto your card too. Try not to make the paint too thick, or you might lose those extra details.
- Press your painted leaf onto the middle of your card and smooth it down gently, making sure to press down around all the edges and along the veins.
- Lift the leaf straight up to reveal your print! Sprinkle lightly with glitter if you fancy adding an extra special something (or your kids, like mine, think everything in life is better with glitter)!
- That’s it! Simple.
Finally, if you’d rather not get the paints out then swap paint for wax crayons instead and do leaf rubbings for a mess-free alternative. You can buy special rubbing crayons in metallic shades if you want the best effect but your average nursery wax crayon used on its side does just as good a job most of the time.
