2nd October:

We are into October already and it still feels like monsoon. The Met department says that rains will go late this year. That means more gloomy days ahead. So anyway, this week I was doing some recipe Contest on Instagram and the recipe that we had chosen to create were fall recipes. But unfortunately I checked that I didn't have any fall décor with me in the house. Amazon India also didn't have much to offer if I wanted a quick delivery within two days. So I decided to go back to the drawing board and make some fall leaves myself. 

In case I haven't already talked about this, I love making any kind of crafts from a very young age and I had started painting frequently after moving to my own house last year. I hadn't painted much during the lockdown, was focusing more on creating new recipes. So when I started this fall leaf project, I was totally overjoyed. Painting always makes me feel happy. That's the power of creation.

In the end it turned out to be one fun project that you can do with your kids and this is very less messy too, at least under the guidance of an adult. So bring out your color and papers and lets make some beautiful fall leaves.

Materials Required:

• A4 sized white paper - 2
• Newspaper - 2 full sheets ( 1 sheet having two joined pages)
• Acrylic or water color - Orange, red, yellow, brown
• Water - 2 small cups
• Brush - 1
• Pencil - 1
• Scissor - 1

Remember you need to start the project at least a day before you want to use the paper leaves. I started two days before.

1. Take about 2 tbsp water in each of the small cups or saucers and add one color in each. Mix them well with the water with the help of a brush. E.g. I went ahead with the following colors together:

Paper 1 : Brown + Orange

Paper 2 : Yellow + Red

You can also have other combination like : Magenta + Red, Red + Brown, Green + yellow etc.. Just use your imagination according to the theme you want.

2. Spread the newspaper first on the floor or the table wherever you are making the craft, remember we don't want messy stains. Now place the two A4 papers at a distance form one another

3. Now as suggested above, take the brown color water and gently at an angle pour it on the first A4 paper. Now on top of that pour the orange color water. Now gentle hold the paper on either sides in your hands and first tilt it to the right so that the watery colors start covering the right side of the page and then tilt it to the left. DO these very gently, as we want the colors to mix creating some light uneven patterns. You can repeat the tilt a couple of times to cover the entire paper. If you still feel the colors haven't covered the paper, you can use your brush to coat the white areas. Let the color texture be uneven, don't use brush all over the page. That will give a realistic feel to the final leaves.

Note: Please not the papers will be very soft at this point so handle with care or else it might tear.

4. Now repeat with yellow and red for paper number 2. 

5. Leave these papers to dry overnight. 

6. Next morning we continue on the project. Now fold the paper just the like the picture into 1.5" folds (each side of fold to be 1.5"). The white part to be folded over so that we can draw on it. This will yield maximum of a 2 inch diameter leaf.

Note: You can scale up the size of the leaves as per your requirement, just make the folds bigger.

7. On the half start drawing the outline of a leaf. It can be a simple curve or pointy edges ones. Go creative with the leaf shapes. Basically you need to just draw one half, when we cut it will give us symmetrical similar shape for the other half too.

8. Cut the papers along the drawn line. If the kid is small to handle scissor, any elder can help with the cutting. Now you will see you have got a beautifully textured leaf. Start drawing the veins with a black pen or pencil as I have done.

Additional Tip : Use a punching machine to punch some hole into the paper leaves to give a moth eaten feel

That's it you have your perfect DIY paper fall leaves. Use it as your photo props or decorating the house for Halloween.