Holding On

I have never been good about listening to my own advice. It's all for the boy I say. "Oooo, look at this one mama! Oh this one is the most beauty-ful one ever! This one looks like it was painted." And the pile grows.

Five year olds have a hard time living in the present. So the mama and the boy try to capture the color. First the old wax paper and iron trick. For starters we don't own an iron. So we borrowed one, but the wax justdidn't seem to melt on to the leaves. It seemed all we were doing was pressing the leaves. Plus the iron draws way too many amps. So pressed the leaves in all manner of books and moved on to Plan B...

GLUE! I saw on one of my favorite blogs 5 Orange Potatoes that modge podge glue can do the trick of preserving leaves (or just glue watered down if you don't have modge podge). We took it one step further and glued on some name tags (Zach wanted to give the leaves as gifts). The glue goes on white-ish and dries nice and clear.

Worked well except that the glue smeared the marker he used to write the names. They have lasted a few days and are holding their color quite well, though seem to be drying out slowly.

Then the beeswax. We headed to a friend's house to melt and dip. Now we're talking. It smelled divine, dried fast, and left a perfect, waxy sheen on our fall finds.

So we're grasping at the fall colors, trying to hold on, hanging them up, piling, fanning, pressing. Not sure what we'll even do with all these leaves. Still living in the now of the glorious golden sunshiney days, but holding on all the same.

Head on over to etsydotmom to see some beautiful bags for little ones...