"Stained Glass" Leaves

It's fall! The season for beautiful colors and leaf piles for jumping, apples and pumpkins and that fresh cool air that is just perfect for sleep. This week, the kids and I made pretty nifty (if I do say so myself) "stained glass" leaves for the windows out of some construction paper and tissue paper. Tissue paper is really pretty awesome when you shine some light through it and it's cheap and easy to work with. Plus, I don't know about you, but I always seems to have some kicking around.

What You Need:

• Tissue Paper in fall colors- red, yellow, orange, etc.
• a piece of black construction paper (though it really could be whatever color, the black just looks nice!)
• scissors
• glue, in paste or stick form, whatever.

What You Do:
Print up the leaf template below and cut out the leaf shape you want. Cut strips of tissue paper in varying widths (half an inch to an inch) and in varying lengths that will span the leaf templates. (Really they don't have to be perfect and this is a great time for little hands to practice cutting). You just need enough tissue to span the leaf.

Fold the black piece of paper in half and trace the leaf template onto the paper with pencil. Then cut out the shape through BOTH layers of black . (OK, here you need precision. So you do this while your octopus cuts tissue). Now if the pencil marks bug you (as they do me!) unfold the paper and refold it so the pencil lines are on the inside. :-)

Open the paper back up. Now you have two cut out mirror-image leaves. glue around the right leaf on the black paper. Now spanning the leaf, stick on the tissue strips any which way you feel like it, layer it up, don't, whatever, it all looks great!

Glue around the other, tissue-less, left leaf, getting the edges too.

Now sandwich that piece of black paper back together so the leaves match up, and Voila! Trim any tissue that might have come out the sides and hang it up in a sunny window.

Perty!

The Printable: