Made It: Fall Leaves

Hello! When our daughter was younger, I used many a stencil set to do arts and crafts with her. 

Well, she's now grown up and the years of doing arts and crafts together are past. I still like using stencils, though. But instead of buying them at the kids' crafts section of toy stores, I now cruise thrift store aisles. 

I've found a variety of stencils this way, from a great set meant to be used in scrapbooking to vintage sets like this:

In this case, "Contemporary" meant the 1950's. There's a variety of stencils in the package, ranging from Biblical figures, of course, to holiday and seasonal shapes. And with today being the first day of fall, I pulled out the two leaf stencils to make some simple decorations. 

I thought I came up with a good idea for the paper to use for the leaves: a page from my 1967 The World Book Atlas, another thrift store find. (I have an affection for vintage World Book products, since my parents had their encyclopedia set when I was growing up, and I pored over it often then). 

Why did I choose an atlas page? Well, if a given country/state/province has a variation in topography, then the colors on its page vary from greens to yellows to oranges - in short, similar in feel to the coloring of the changing leaves this time of year. 

I used the page from France and here's what my leaves look like:

Above, an assortment of leaves, with the middle one singled out to be used on my fall weathergram. 

Close-up of some of the leaves:

If I'd picked the page that shows western Canada, I would have brighter yellows and oranges due to the higher elevations being depicted. I still like my French leaves though. 

Like I said, this was a simple craft - but sometimes simple is good! 

I'll assemble the fall weathergram later on today. If you'd like to make your own to usher in the season, look HERE.