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 Leaf Crafts and Activities

I hold my hands up, I’m not by any stretch of the imagination particularly good at crafting with my son. I’ll give it a go because it’s important for him to know that you don’t have to be any good at something to enjoy it. Having fun is the most important lesson, so this week we turned our hands to some autumn leaf crafts and had lots of fun.

One dry afternoon we went to our local park for a picnic, afterwards we had a little walk and collected a bag of leaves, pine cones, pine needles, bark, sycamore seeds and anything else we could find. This was itself a fun and learning activity, we talked about why leaves turn brown, the different colours and shapes, how leaves feel, what seeds and pine cones are and what happens to seeds when you plant them.

Autumn Leaf Crafts

We loved our trip to the park and it was the perfect excuse to warm up with a mug of hot chocolate when we got home. We left the leaves to dry for a bit and then got to work.

1. Put a nice veiny leaf under a piece of paper and rub over it with a crayon, this will give a relief of the leaf. Try it with different kinds of leaves.

2. We did some nice sticking and gluing. We glued some leaves to some paper and drew pictures around them. He liked this because he liked painting the glue on the leaves and being quite precise with it. This was great for his fine motor skills.

3. We held a leaf on a piece of paper and dabbed round it with some paint on a sponge. This is quite a pretty effect and it helped him think about the shape of the leaf and its outline.

4. The small boy had his cousin round to play, we decided to make a big tree. We taped a long roll of paper to the side of the kitchen cupboard (which meant it was easy to wipe drips where they’d missed the paper), we painted a large tree and some grass and we stuck a variety of leaves to the branches of the tree and also in the grass. This was a lovely activity, the boys got involved in some team work and alternated jobs.

easy autumn leaf crafts

We’ve had some messy-ish fun and we learnt a lot about autumn. We’ve had a great few days playing with and crafting with the bag of leaves we picked up from the park. It’s been pretty cheap entertainment too, for the small cost of some paper, paint and glue we’ve done a small stack of autumnal activities.