Crafteroonie: Fast Fall Craft

I was home alone this weekend and the crafting bug hit. Hard. I browsed projects I've bookmarked on my computer, decided which ones I was going to tackle, and made a trip to Hobby Lobby. I love you Hobby Lobby. While I was there I found some new fall decorations, took lots of pictures of possible decor for the wedding, and left with much more than I went in for. Details later this week or next about the project that inspired the HL trip.

While I was perusing the aisles, I walked past the aisle containing felt and immediately thought of the Valentine's decoration I had made. Inspiration! I veered right and picked out some fall felt colors for a new crafty idea.

SUPPLIES:
* Felt in fall colors
* Coordinating ribbon
* Scissors
* Leaf pattern (I found mine in Google Images, copied into Word, printed off and traced/cut out of cardboard)
* Glue gun
* Lighter, matches, or candle lighter

supplies

patterns

1. After you trace and cut out your leaf stencil, trace onto felt pieces. I cut out two leaves in each color, but didn't end up using all of them. You can cut more or less, depending on how you want it to look. I suggest using permanent markers to trace, preferably in colors similar to the felt (I used black for the red felt, and orange for the yellow/orange felt).

2. Cut out your leaves. Preferrably while watching an episode of Bridezillas and gasping at their craziness.

3. I decided to use the lighter to spiffen up the edges of the leaves a little bit. The candle lighters where you push the button to ignite worked well for this because it kept my fingers from getting too hot like a match would, and it can quickly be extinguished. Run the lighter quickly along all the edges of your leaves so the edges darken/melt slightly. Don't hold it too long in one spot, or it will melt and start to shrivel up. This happened to me a couple times on one leaf and the points of the leaves disappeared, making the leaf very lop-sided.

4. Hot glue the leaves to one length of ribbon.. I used a spacer (just the width of a measuring tape) to make sure all the leaves were equally spaced apart on the ribbon. I cut about a 4-in. piece of ribbon, looped it in half, and glued to the top of the first leaf to use as a hanger.

5. Viola! Easy, quick, and cute! Honestly, once I found the leaf pattern and printed it off, this was done in under an hour.