Tutorial--trees for your autumn nature table...

...or any ol' display.

The initial inspiration came from a post where someone was using watercolored coffee filters as the material for cutting autumn leaves for a window decoration.  I spent nearly an hour haunting my favorite craft blogs trying to find it to no avail.  If you find it, let me know so that I can link to it.  [NB: thank you, City Wife, for finding it for me!  It is here.]

Anyway, I pulled out my coffee filters and my much-loved liquid watercolors and laid the filters out on newsprint.  Then I sprayed the filters with water, and dropped nice big splats of paint onto them.  I love watching watercolors spread out on wet paper.  I used yellow, green, orange red and brown.  My photos of the painted filters came out rather fuzzy and uninspiring, unfortunately.  While they were drying, I went out and searched our shrubs for some dead, tree-like branches for my trees.  I found some that fit the bill very well, and, because I needed them to have longer "trunks", I used masking tape to attach them to some sticks.

When the filters were dry, I folded them into eighths and cut little leaves from them.

Now comes the crazy part:  I hot-glued the leaves to the branches.  Other glues were not drying quickly enough.  So I burned my fingers and pulled off the countless glue-threads, and it worked pretty well.

Stick them in a vase or tuck them in somewhere for some autumn joy!

[For more autumn joy, here is another autumn leaf tutorial!]