Fall crafts are some of the most colorful, pumpkin, and leaf-filled activities around. They are right up there with going apple picking, visiting a pumpkin patch, or enjoying something with pumpkin spice.
This year, we had to make a choice between doing something spooky and creating something beautiful. As you can imagine from the title of this article, we chose to make something beautiful.
Fall Craft: Make a Natural Gift Basket
Before we get started, we wanted to point you toward some of the fall crafts that we found on the internet while deciding what project we should share with you.
One of our favorite crimping crafts is card making. There are many beautiful ideas to be found on Pinterest if paper crafts are up your alley. Here is one of our favorite ideas. Here is another idea for paper leaves that looked fun. There are just so many crafts to make this time of year!
This year, we wanted to capture autumn’s beginning with a craft, so we decided to do something that takes advantage of nature’s bounty instead of using paper. After all, the sugar maple out back is just beginning to turn, and capturing that glorious variety of red, yellow, and green is simply the best part of fall.
So, this year we decided to go au natural and use real leaves to line a pretty gift basket. Not only does it look nice, but it’s a beautiful way to make your gifts more sustainable.
You will need:
- Fall leaves of various shades
- Scissors
- A basket
- A Tube-Wringer
Instructions:
1. Cut the stems off of your leaves.
2. Cut your fall leaves into strips. We used sugar maple leaves, and prefer to preserve some of the original look of the leaf, so we cut mine up into fourths. If you are using something smaller like birch, you may want to cut the leaves in half or leave them whole.
3. Run the leaves through a Tube-Wringer for a very subtle crimp. This is just so the leaf filler will not lie completely flat in your basket.
4. Now for the best part, run the stems through your Tube-Wringer. The stems hold a really lovely crimp.
5. Arrange the leaves and stems in your basket.
6. Add a gift and it to your friend!
A Note on Leaf Preservation
We decided not to preserve the leaves we used for our project. The filler in a gift basket is often thrown away, after all.
However, if you are interested in capturing fall color for the long term, leaf preservation might be right up your alley.
You can preserve the color in fall leaves for quite some time using a few methods, including pressing, using liquid glycerin, and using beeswax. We prefer the beeswax method.
Crimping Delicate Items with a TubeWringer
You may have noticed that we use a Light-Duty TubeWringer to crimp paper and lighter items – like leaves. This is because the rollers on the Light-Duty are made of plastic, making them a little less harsh to use on delicate items.
If you have a heavier TubeWringer, you can try this and all of our other paper crafts on that wringer. Just use a light hand. When using TubeWringer to squeeze every drop out of tubes, we recommend holding on tight – but when crimping delicate items, go ahead and experiment with loosening your grip.
Believe me, we use our TubeWringers to squeeze tubes all the time and, because we are used to taking a solid grip, we usually end up ripping something when crimping before getting the grip just right for a paper or leaf craft.
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