Decorating Fall Trees

 Happy October!!! I'm so beyond ready for cooler weather and all of the fun things Fall has associated with it. Unfortunately, Texas has yet to get the memo about my desire for cooler weather so we are still wearing shorts and enjoying extremely green trees and grass. Sigh. I just decided to take matters into my own hands and make a Fall inspired project for Charlotte to enjoy last week.

Here are the supplies we used:

Cardstock in a variety of Fall colors
a set of leaf rubber stamps
brown ink
Contact Paper
tape
scissors
paper punches

I have seen a ton of idea for toddlers to use contact paper, but this is the first time we have ever tried it out ourselves. I found this big roll at Hobby Lobby for a couple bucks. We barely used any of it so that means we will have plenty for other future projects. I started by pulling out a few pages of cardstock that would make pretty Fall leaves. You could easily use construction paper as well. I had this fall leaf set packed away with all of my old stamping stuff so I dug it out to use. After making our DIY Space Stamps, Charlotte has been really eager to stamp all the time. If you don't have a leaf stamp, no worries. Either draw or have you child draw a variety of leaves onto the paper. You could easily find templates online or even better, go on a scavenger hunt for leaves that you could trace.

 

 We had eight different leaf shapes so we stamped them four times on all of the different colors giving us a ton of leaves. That might sound like a lot, but I knew once Charlotte started this project she would love doing it and I wanted to have plenty for her to use. The toughest part of this entire project is cutting out all of these leaves and that really wasn't hard, just a little time consuming.

Don't they look pretty in their little wooden bowl? I so wish our leaves down here turned these beautiful vibrant colors!!! Once your leaves are ready, you will need to cut out a base for your tree. I just freehanded it with my scissors and cut out three of them from cardstock!

 

 I had originally planned on hanging this up with painters tape, but then I found some double sided tape in my stamping stash and decided to use that so it would keep everything clear. You want to hang up you contact paper with the sticky side facing out. Once it is mounted on your wall, attach your trees. It's time to decorate!!

 

Charlotte had a blast sticking the leaves all over the trees. She was determined to get at least one on every single branch. I think she did a fantastic job. She was also very curious about the names of each leaf so that gave us a chance to talk about different trees and how leaves change colors and eventually drop off of the trees during Fall. 

 Once all of our leaves were attached to the trees ( told you we would use all of them), Charlotte looked at me and exclaimed that Fall trees need acorns. Yep, they sure do! I gave it a moments thought and realized that I could easily make some quick acorns for her to use. I dug out a few old Stamping Up! punches (Word Window and Slot) and pieced together a few acorns. She also spotted my Martha Stewart Fence Punch and wanted to add that to the picture. Little stinker also told me she needed a squirrel to collect the acorns, but I haven't tackled that one yet, LOL. 

The good thing about using contact paper is that the images stick to it, but they just as easily peel off again. It has been a week since we completed this project the first time and our contact paper is still hanging and still sticky. We have peeled off all of the leaves and acorns numerous times so we could redecorate our trees again. Let me know if you give this project a try. We would love to see how you decorate your trees. Happy Fall y'all!!!