Waxed Leaves

How beautiful are the trees right now?!  We are all enjoying the Fall colors and wanted to preserve a few of them.  Sunday we took a family walk around the neighborhood and collected some really beautiful leaves.  Then we dipped them in beeswax to preserve them, and then strung some and made some into a wreath.  It was a much simpler project that I had feared, and they turned out great.  My only warning- use a junk pan (thrift store perhaps), not your everyday cookware.  We used pots from Violet's mudpie kitchen and were glad that we did- the wax will be on there forever.  

Violet and Matt sorting out our finds

Melting our little beeswax bear...turns out the eyeballs were the last thing to melt, making it slightly unnerving.  We made a doubler boiler with two pots from Violet's mudpie kitchen.

dipping the leaves and drying them on waxed paper

We used a needle and thread to string the leaves into a chain

Makes it look nice and festive for the season

Here we just pinned the leaf stems to a styrofoam wreath form from the dollar store...I think it turned out kind of neat!