DIY Felt Leaves for Fall Decor

Oh, the beautiful bluffs of southeastern Minnesota are beginning to change their leaves! And after a very warm September, it is definitely starting to feel more like fall now. Just a couple weeks ago, we teamed up with 30 other bloggers to create all kinds of fall decorating and recipe inspirations to help our followers get ready for the season.

We decided to create an un-traditional fall tablescape using a surprise color – one that isn’t typically used for fall. And because we had such a specific color blue we wished to utilize, we had to DIY a couple of items in order to incorporate that special blue we love!

The first thing we decided to change up, were some cheap chargers we had previously bought. We chalk painted those in our favorite blue, but we didn’t stop there! While we were brainstorming, I came up with the idea to cut out leaf shapes out of felt (which I already had) and then dip dye them in the blue paint we loved! And boy did they turn out beautifully!

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Here is what you will need to DIY your own shapes:

Ivory Felt
Scissors
leaf shape (we found our shapes from Word’s ‘Clipart’)
A cup
Paint
Water

Seriously, almost all of those items everbody should already have on hand. The only things you may need to get is the felt and paint!

Tip: We used our favorite Chalk Paint by Annie Sloan for this project. Most craft paints should work though.

First things first, we printed off some leaf shapes from Microsoft Word and traced them onto the felt using a thin-tipped pen sharpie. We printed about four different styles of leaves, some big and some small.

The next step was to cut out all the shapes.

Once all of the leaves were cut we mixed our chalk paint with some water so we could dye them. We mixed about a 1 to 1 ratio of paint to water. Some paints might need less water…Chalk paint is quite thick.

Next we went leaf by leaf and dipped just the edges into the dye mixture. We wanted the water and paint mixture to ‘wick’ up the felt fabric, veining out, so we only dipped the edges and it soaked up the felt a little bit to create that pretty look to them.

Then all you have to do is let them dry! Easy, right?! Thats what we thought. We just scattered the leaves across our runners for the fall tablescape, but I decided to use them on my buffet as well. Tucked under this pumpkin on these gorgeous plates is perfect too!