Projects with Pressed Leaves and Flowers

If you have a garden or a backyard or even just a few indoor plants, you and your children can gather a few leaves. 

There are so many activities you can do with them. Just from among the activities that were featured in this blog, you can make leaf rubbings, leaf prints, or negative leaf prints using the splatter painting technique.

Then, you can also press them and make projects with them. Just insert them between the pages of an old telephone directory, put some heavy books or other heavy items on top of the directory for weight, and leave the leaves alone for a few days. 

When they are already dry, you can use them to decorate cards, book marks, or other items.  Or you can simply make pretty pictures with them.

Another thing you can do with pressed leaves is to make an herbarium. "Herbarium" is just a fancy name for a leaf scrap book.  Just mount  the leaves on one sheet of paper each and write descriptions of each plant, and then bind the sheets.  You can also use an old notebook that still has blank pages.

Making herbariums is a serious activity for botanists. In making an herbarium, you and your children will not just be doing art; you will be doing science as well.

(NOTE: Make sure to wash your hands after handling leaves as some of them may be poisonous.  Never put leaves in your mouth unless you are 100% sure they are edible.  This free app, which enables kids to make a digital herbarium, also gives safety information about plants.)

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