An easy autumn DIY project in time for Thanksgiving

Hey there sleepy muffin readers!

I don't know about you, but I have got the serious after lunch sleepies today. Maybe because its a little humid and overcast. Definitely ideal weather for a nice nap :)

Anyways.....I have been going through a holiday home decor flurry this past week in an attempt to try to decorate for other holidays besides Christmas. I'd really like my son to enjoy every holiday as he grows up so all the decorating Ive been doing lately is my baby steps in that direction.

So as a way to celebrate autumn and help you decorate your home for thanksgiving here's a little project I finished recently:

Felt Autumn leaf garland:

 

This project was super, super easy and doesn't take much effort to make. In my opinion its easy enough that with supervision its fairly kid friendly as well. Its also a fairly inexpensive project as well. I think it probably cost me less than $5 to make. It may cost slightly more if you don't have some equipment such as a hot glue and I already had my own yarn but still the overall cost wasn't bad.

 Items you'll need:

• Colored felt sheets - I was able to find these at my local craft store for 29 cents a sheet and one sheet of each color was way more than enough.
• 3 even lengths of yarn - I had originally wanted to use a thin jute rope, but I had some interesting green yarn and decided to use that instead. Another option to use for this project would be ribbon.
• brown puff paint (fabric paint)
• hot glue gun and glue sticks
• scissors and pen

As you can see from my photo, my fireplace mantle was the ideal place to put my garland, so all I did was measure my lengths of yarn by hand. Once I got the length I wanted, I braided them together to make a thicker rope. 

Next, I googled some images of fall leaves and used these as a visual template to draw my leaves onto the felt with a pen (see images below for my results).


I wasn't intending for it to look absolutely perfect, so I got my pen and hand-drew them and cut them out. If you need an actual template to go by I would recommend doing a autumn leaf image search on Google and printing out a few different varieties as your templates.

Once all my leaves were cut out, I flipped them over in case they still had some pen marks (like the maple leaf to the left *blush*) and got my nifty puff paint pen and started drawing veins on the leafs and some detail on my acorn caps. After your pieces are nice and dry grab your glue gun and glue those guys to your yarn rope and its ready to display!

Since my mantle isn't very big, I ended up making only 2 of each type of leaf but what is so great about this project is that you can make as many or as little as you like.

A little side note: I had originally intended on putting a single acorn on the garland but I ran out of space. So instead of tossing out that cute little guy I decided to glue him onto the bottom of the other acorn and give the effect of falling acorns.

So, there's a simple little DIY project that is flexible enough for you to personalize it to your own tastes. I apologize for not getting this post out sooner. I had to throw all my time into preparing for a craft fair I was participating in last weekend so its been a bit hectic and my poor blog has suffered. I promise to be much more consistent from here on out.

I truly hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and that you spend some wonderful time with family and loved ones.

Love,

The Little Sleepy Muffin