A Leafly Card!

A Leafly Card for a Leafly Day

A few years ago, I tried using leaves as stamps, and I was surprised at how well it worked. So, I decided to break out this technique again and went on a leaf hunt one night while taking a walk around the neighborhood. There are so many interesting shapes! These are the leaves I found for the project:

I think it works best when you have a good variation in sizes and shapes.

You can use the leaf kind of like you would a stamp just be sure to work a little more gently, so the leaf doesn't get torn.

Place the leaf on your paper as you would any stamp.

Here's where there's a little trick. It seemed to work best if I placed a piece of paper over the leaf after placing it where I wanted, and then I pressed on the paper and rubbed it a little to get as much of the ink off the leaf as possible. This kept the leaf in place and kept it from tearing.

You can repeat with the same leaf several times. The only drawback is that you have to use either the same color or a darker color (since you can't exactly use stamp cleaner on a leaf!). The good news though it that you can get a bunch of the same type of leaf if you want to do different colors.

Continue with this process with different colors and shapes of leaves.

I believe I used four different types of leaves with a different color for each type. You can do as many or as few leaves as you would like. I didn't want my leaves too crowded, so I stopped at four.

I created my leaf collage with a piece of paper large enough to cut into pieces for four cards. After I cut each piece I used a sponge and a darker brown ink to distress each piece.

I printed the sentiment on my computer and added some twine to the side for an extra touch. The card base was a precut package I bought a couple years ago and hadn't been able to use yet (I wish I could say I did that scalloped edge myself!).

I stamped a lighter piece of card stock with a larger leaf and glued it to the inside  for the message area.

I went ahead and created all four cards, but placed the sentiments in different places. Each card is unique, but all of them are very leafly if I do say so myself!

Linking to Craft Schooling Sunday at Creative Jewish Mom