Thursday, November 05, 2009

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...

9 comments:

healing hillary said...

i love the smell of beeswax. we've just discovered the beauty of beeswax+ leaves in our home too.

kate said...

So fun... you are one sweet mama-- and I love the leaves with your names on them. Our leaves have all fallen and are heading toward that earthy brown...it is nice to catch glimpse of those autumn colors a few more times!

dreaming in maine said...

What a great idea! I think we might just have a few colorful ones left lying around to try this with!

Simple Mama said...

We love beeswaxed leaves here too. I stole Hillary's idea and strung mine up - like a leaf garland. I blogged about it today if you want to see pictures.

Unknown said...

Cool! Love that idea.

Joy said...

Paul just brought home a pound of wax from a beekeeper he works with and I really contemplated trying this, but ultimately decided to use the wax for candle-dipping which we'll be trying this weekend. The leaves are so cute. I love Zach's naming of them. :)

molly said...

Oh, I'm so happy I stumbled on this! A friend mentioned this beeswax business, and here it is! Thanks.

5orangepotatoes said...

Love the names on the leaves! Yummy smell of beeswax......

lisa

Dim Sum, Bagels, and Crawfish said...

Gorgeous leaves (we don't have anything like that around here) and beautiful way to preserve them! Happy, Happy Autumn to you and your family!

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