Autumn Leaf Crafts: Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

As much as I absolutely loved the summer this year, I’m pleased as punch that it’s autumn and we’re in that lovely crisp, crunchy leaves part of autumn, before everything goes soggy, slippy and a bit miserable. One thing we love doing is collecting the colourful fallen leaves and making things with them. For a bit of fun we made some autumn leaf faces with our leaves and gave them a bit of character. These simple leaf faces are really easy to make and with a bit of imagination you can really bring your leaf characters to life!

They’re so simple to do, just go on a little nature walk and collect some lovely leaves. If they’re freshly dropped and not dry and crisp I think they work better, but try to collect a variety of different leaves and colours.

Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

You will need:
A collection of leaves
Some googly eyes
PVA glue, I used Bostik White Glu
A black sharpie

Autumn Leaf Crafts: Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

How to make your Autumn Leaf Faces:
Take your leaf and dust it down so you rub any dirt off. Take your googly eyes and glue them on wherever you think they should go on the leaf. Just use a dab of glue on the back of each eye.

Think about what kind of character your leaf may be and think about how close together their eyes should be, should they be the same size eyes? Is your leaf a cyclops (one eye) or an alien (three or more eyes)?

Autumn Leaf Crafts: Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

Using the black felt tip or sharpie, draw on a mouth and maybe some eyebrows. Again think about the character and what kind of features it might have.

Leave your leaf faces to one side for a little while to allow the glue to dry. If you really like your leaves, you could stick them to lolly sticks and make them into little leafy puppets.

Our leaf faces are full of character, they make me smile a lot. I think I will sew them onto some embroidery thread and make some leafy bunting out of them.

If you enjoyed this autumn leaf craft, you might also like to try these:

Autumn Leaf Crafts: Simple Autumn Leaf Faces

Craft Round Up: Five Easy Autumn Leaf Crafts

At this time of year the trees are shedding their beautiful leaves. The pavements and paths are filled with crispy and colourful leaves and they are crying out to be used in crafts. Easy autumn leaf crafts are amongst my favourite kinds of craft, partly because it’s good fun to actually collect the leaves, then sitting down with the boys and having fun crafting something beautiful makes me happy. Here are some of my five favourite ideas for easy autumn leaf crafts.

Autumn Leaf Sand Art

Easy Autumn Leaf Crafts

We are firm fans of sand art and we loved doing this fab kit from Baker Ross. My top tip for sand art is to do it on a tray or a piece of paper so you can collect any stray sand to use again later. Sand art kits are fab, just peel the stickers off the leaf and sprinkle sand onto the sticky paper underneath. It requires some concentration and a steady hand, but my five year old loved it and I think he made some very beautiful autumn leaves.

Make your own Autumn Wreath

This is a great rainy day activity. Using some foam stickers from Baker Ross and a paper plate we made our own autumn wreath which I think looks pretty cool, and he enjoyed making it which is the most important thing.

Making Autumnal Alphabet Wreaths

This is a craft I did myself (a grown up craft if you will), but you could easily do this with children too. I think this looks fab and it was really good fun to do too, it’s probably one of my favourite easy autumn leaf crafts. You can read my tutorial here.

Create an autumnal woodland wonderland

easy autumn leaf crafts

This is one of those easy autumn leaf crafts which is good to have up your sleeve for a rainy day. It was incredibly easy, but he had the best time making his woodland wonderland, who doesn’t love stickers? These woodland foam stickers from Baker Ross are great. We used them with some of the leftover leaf stickers from our autumn wreath and made our lovely woodland scenes. All I had to do was print out a silhouette of a tree and he did the rest.

Paint your own tree

I’m very fond of this one. We had so much fun going to the park and collecting a big bag of leaves. When we got home we had a hot chocolate and warmed up. We painted a big tree and then stuck leaves on it. This wonderful artwork is still hung up in our kitchen and it makes me smile at the memory every time I see it.

These are my ideas for easy autumn leaf crafts – what do you like to make at this time of year?

Five Easy Autumn Leaf Crafts

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Crafts: Autumnal Alphabet Wreaths

This week it has been dry, crisp and decidedly autumnal. During a walk around my local park I filled a bag with fallen leaves to do autumn leaf crafts with the boy, but as I’d gathered so many I wanted to make something by myself, for myself. So whilst the boys were out feeding the ducks, I spent a happy hour at the kitchen table making autumnal alphabet wreaths.

autumnal alphabet wreaths

These autumnal alphabet wreaths are really easy to make. I’m really pleased with how mine turned out. You can make whichever letter, or letters you want. I chose an A because our surname begins with an A. You could also do any shape you wanted. I’ve got plans to do a few more, maybe a heart and a circle.

You will need:

A piece of thick cardboard
A pencil
Scissors
PVA glue
A paintbrush
Lots of leaves, a variety of shapes and sizes is best
A piece of ribbon

To make your autumnal alphabet wreaths:

With your pencil, sketch the letter or shape you will base your wreath on. You can make this as big or small as you would like, mine was around 30cm tall. Carefully cut out your shape, taking care not to lose any fingers. If a child is making this, ideally an adult should do this part.

Before you begin sticking your leaves to your wreath shape, it’s easier to fix on your ribbon. As I knew my shape would be covered in leaves I chose to staple my ribbon to the wreath, but you could tie the ribbon to the top, or make a small hole and thread it through if you prefer.

autumnal alphabet wreaths

Once you are happy with the cardboard base of your wreath, pour some PVA glue into a bowl and in sections paste glue onto the cardboard. As you start to stick the leaves on, dab a little extra glue on each leaf and stick the leaf to the shape. Try and choose an interesting mixture of leaves and cover any gaps.

I found it useful to stop every so often and leave the glue to set a little before starting the next section. You may also find it helpful to lay a plastic tray or board on top of the leaves for half an hour or so, this will apply even pressure whilst the glue dries a bit and it shouldn’t crush the leaves too much.

autumnal alphabet wreaths

Once you’ve covered your alphabet wreaths, leave them somewhere to dry, preferably overnight. Once dry you can hang them up indoors. I’m really pleased with how mine turned out. It was really effective and would lend itself to lots of different and rather interesting shapes.

Autumn leaf crafts are some of my favorite things to so, I think the colours and textures are so lovely, it’s a shame not to make the most of them whilst they’re so vibrant.

autumnal alphabet wreaths

Autumn Crafts – Make your own Autumn wreath

We went for a little walk yesterday around the park and we looked at all the different colours of the leaves. It was a mellow, autumnal day, still warm but with a slight seasonal dampness. The slow death of summer and the beginnings of decay were all around us. It was a good chance to talk about change and the seasons. Inspired by this we came home and made an autumn wreath. It was really simple and lots of fun to do. Why don’t you have a go too?

autumn wreath

You will need:
One paper plate
Orange paint (plus paintbrush etc)
Leaf foam stickers
A short piece of ribbon or string
Sticky tape
Scissors

A few days before our walk we painted our paper plates orange, we had to give them a couple of coats of paint and we left them to dry. Once they were dry I cut out the inside of the plate, leaving a ring which we could decorate.

We sat down with our packet of leaf foam stickers from Baker Ross (currently available at a bit of a bargain price), and got sticking. The pack contains six assorted leaf designs in autumnal shades. Which gave us another chance to talk about leaves, autumn and the seasons.

Once we’d decorated our autumn wreath to our satisfaction, I cut a loop of ribbon and stuck it to the back of the paper plate ring with sticky tape, and we proudly hung our autumn wreath up on the wall.

It’s a really, really simple craft activity, but I think the result is quite effective and it’s a lovely way to brighten up the house a bit now the nights are beginning to get shorter. Roll on Christmas! (Too soon?)

Autumn Crafts – Painting Hedgehog Tealight Holders

It may be September, but the world has suddenly slipped into autumn. Autumn is one of my favourite seasons, full of mellow fruitfulness, crunchy leaves and an excuse to get our open fire lit and roaring. The small boy and I have been noticing the changes around us on our walks, the berries in the hedgerows, the acorns and conkers starting to fall from the trees and the busy squirrels stocking up for the lean winter months. This lead us to start talking about hibernation and the snuffling, shuffling hedgehogs which we rarely see by often read about.

We were sent a box of ceramic hedgehog tealight holders to paint from craft company Baker Ross, so one afternoon after our autumnal walk we sat down and painted them up.

Hedgehog Tealight Holders

The box contained four plain white ceramic hedgehog tealight holders and we used some paint which we were sent to decorate them. A box of four ceramic hedgehog tealight holders currently costs just £4.40, which I think is good value and you can paint them up as presents for people.

Hedgehog Tealight Holders

I chose to paint mine blue with multi-coloured spots and the small boy wanted to paint his black and red. As you can see from the picture he was really focused on the task and he sat and painted his hedgehog for about half an hour or so. This is a great craft activity which works to strengthen his hand muscles, improve his hand-eye co-ordination and his attention to detail.

Hedgehog Tealight Holders

While we were painting we chatted away about hedgehogs and I looked up a few hedgehog facts for him. Did you know….?

A baby hedgehog is called a hoglet
Each hedgehog has about 5000 spiky spines, each one falls out after about a year
Hedgehogs hibernate in the winter, they eat as much as they can and then find a cosy nest to curl up in for the winter around October
A hedgehog is nocturnal and only comes out at night to forage for food
A hedgehogs favourite food is slugs – yukky!

Hedgehog Tealight Holders

Here are our finished hedgehog tealight holders. We’re very proud of them. They were easy to paint and I think they look really good. Despite my initial thought that the black and red hedgehog might look a bit gothic, I think he’s managed to create quite an interesting effect. He’s incredibly proud of his creation and loved to show it off to visitors and enjoys me lighting it at night.