So here's one of my little projects I've been working on--these are a fun craft to do if you like things that involve short stretches of effort spread out over several days or weeks.
Leaf dish!
I should note that these are non-food-safe trinket dishes; if you wanted to make a food-safe version, you'd need to use more expensive materials.
I made a whole bunch of these because I'm going to do give them out for Christmas. I started the first batch (the green ones) when we were at Black Moshannon this summer, and then once I got those done I did another batch here at home.
The basic concept is leaves + air-dry clay + paint.
First you collect your leaves; I mostly used big leaves, where the leaf is the mold for the whole dish, but I also did a few like this,
Where I made an imprint and then shaped a little dish shape around it. This style could probably be done a lot more nicely if you're experienced with clay, but I think they came out OK.
To keep costs down, I bought the big bricks of white air-dry clay, and colored it by kneading in oil paint.
Michaels was getting rid of some, so I got a bunch--a few different greens and browns, plus blue and yellow. Kneading the paint in is quite messy and takes a while, but the clay gets quite expensive if you buy it in colors.
This whole batch came from one brick of clay, which cost about $8 at Michaels.
I did find that I needn't have fussed quite as much as I did about the colors of the oil paint; I did all kinds of color mixing on the green ones, and they all came out looking pretty similar. So if you're doing this, and the oil paint is not on clearance, one tube of some shade of green for the spring/summer ones, or one tube of brown for autumn ones, is enough.
Once the paint is all kneaded in, you take a lump of clay, roll it out with a rolling pin, and then place a leaf on. Go over the leaf again with the rolling pin, and cut out around it with a knife:
then the tricky bit is that you want them to dry slightly curved, so it has a dish shape. I tried laying them over bits of firewood, stones, and little dishes:
But once I was on the second batch, what I found really worked the best was using leaf dishes from the first batch.
The ones where the leaf is just pressed in are a lot easier to dry:
Let them dry for a day or two, and then you can gently peel off the leaf. The clay will still be pretty pliable at this point, so you can also adjust the curve of your dishes a little.
Another lesson learned is that you want to use green leaves; if the leaves dry out before the clay does, they won't peel off nicely.
After leaf removal, let the dishes sit at least several more days, to dry out completely, before you paint them again.
This time you're using acrylic paint, and these are against just dead cheap ones from Michaels. I also bought a lot more than I needed for these; what I ended up using was, for the green ones, either the silver or gold and the Sea Mist Pearl, and then for the autumn ones,
This antique copper and the champagne pearl color.
With some of the green ones, I traced the veins from the original leaf in the metallic paint. These didn't turn out quite as nicely as I had hoped--I don't do a lot of painting, so there's probably some room for improvement there.
And some of them I brushed over the whole thing.
With the autumn ones, I found that tracing the veins didn't really turn out, so I did the whole surface with those. Either way, the metallic paint seems to really bring out the pattern of the leaf nicely--I tried some other paint colors and finishes, but it was the metallics that really looked nicest.
But they were a little too bright:
They were brassier than this, in person. But going over it again with a very light coat of the pearl finish paint--a light green for the green ones, a light brown for these--brought down the shine and made them look a lot nicer:
Once the paint is fully dry, the last step is a coat of a clear sealant; I used this modge-podge:
Oh, and I also put my initials on the back with paint marker, and the date and location where I collected the leaves:
On a few of them I also had the type of leaf, but most of them by the time I got to that step, I didn't know anymore.
And that's how you make leaf dishes! They're pretty inexpensive to make, and easy, but you do need to have someplace you can spread them out to dry, multiple times at different stages in the process.
