Fall Crafting...

I love fall...once we've gotten ourselves back-to-school an into the routine of school and sports, fall is a season to relax.  Rainy days...cool mornings...crisp sunny afternoons...I love them all.  I wanted to share with you my latest craft... a falling leaves welcome wreath.

I started with 12 small wooden leaf cutouts, a wooden pumpkin and several fall-ish papers.  I also had my mod podge on hand and some antiquing gel.

 To cover the leaves, I started by tracing around each leaf onto the back of the decorative paper.

Then, I put the paper onto a scrap of card board and traced inside the line with a stylus.  This almost perforated the paper so that I was able to...

...tear the leaf out of the paper.  You could certainly cut the leaf shape out of the paper, but I really liked the look of the torn paper.

Then it was time to mod podge all the papers onto the leaves.  A little messy!

I traced and tore paper to cover the pumpkin just like I did for the leaves and mod podged it onto the pumpkin.  Once the orange paper was on, the stem and leaf looked too white so I rubbed on a bit of green acrylic paint.

Then it was time for the antiquing gel.  I just rubbed some on with a foam brush and wiped it off with a piece of flannel.  You can keep adding antiquing until you get the look you want. 

I antiqued all the leaves too and took this picture to show you the difference a little antiquing can make.

Finally I laid out all the leaves around the pumpkin to get just the look I wanted...

...and hot glued them all together.  After a couple of letters and a light spray of acrylic covering...

I was pretty happy with the final look!  I think this will look great in my kitchen for the fall season.