Kids can make these gorgeous, glittered fall leaf ornaments using our easy 2-ingredient clay dough recipe,
I love crafting in the fall with the kids here in my home daycare. Fall leaves continue to inspire our crafts here this month, and we’ve done some wonderful projects.
A couple of our favourites are:
Today’s glittered clay dough leaves might be our most beautiful leaf craft yet.
I love how each leaf is unique, and the way they shimmer in the sunlight.
Aren’t they spectacular?
The inspiration for our fall leaf ornaments came from these sparkling Valentines ornaments we made last year.
We used the same recipe and process; we just used leaf cookie cutters instead of heart cookie cutters.
2-Ingredient White Clay Recipe
We’ve used our 2 ingredient white clay dough to make these leaf ornaments. If you haven’t made it before, you can find it here.
We’ve made so many different ornaments with this recipe over the years. It’s our go-to homemade clay when we’re crafting. It’s simple to make, and it’s easy to work with. The only ingredients (other than water) are baking soda and cornstarch, so the result is a beautiful, pure white dough.
Alternatives to glitter
We’ve chosen to decorate our clay dough fall leaves with glitter, but you could also decorate these ornaments with acrylic paint like we did for our Thanksgiving Gratitude Tree, or you could press sparkly gems and jewels into the dough while the ornaments are still damp.
I’m not sure how we’ll display our glittered leaf ornaments yet, but here are a few ideas I’m thinking of:
Ways to display your glittered leaf ornaments:
- from a large branch displayed as a centerpiece on your Thanksgiving table
- from a smaller bunch of branches displayed in a vase
- strung into a garland
- string and add name tags to use as place markers at your Thanksgiving table
If you have some suggestions of your own, I’d love to hear them.
Ok, shall I show you how we made our glittered leaf ornaments so you can get down to the business of making some for your home or classroom students?
To make our Glittered Leaf Ornaments, you’ll need:
Make Your Clay Dough
We started off with a batch of our white clay dough, and rolled it out to a thickness of a 1/4 inch.
How to Make Your Clay Leaves
Then we used our maple leaf cookie cutter to cut as many leaves as we could out of the dough.
Once we’d cut out all of our leaves, we made a hole in the top of each leaf with a drinking straw.
Then we placed our leaves on a cookie rack to dry overnight. Depending on the temperature and humidity levels in your home, drying time may vary.
You can see in the above photo that when our leaves dried, some had fine cracks on the surface. If you were painting your leaves, this would be kind of cool because those lines would look like veins in the leaves.
When our leaves were dry, we headed to the craft table with our glitter and glue.
We brushed glue all over the front of each leaf, and then sprinkled the leaves with a generous helping of fine glitter.
We tapped any loose glitter off onto a platter. We’ll save that glitter to use for another project. Even though the colours are all mixed up, it’s still good glitter, and it will be perfect for another craft.
That’s really all there is to these glittered leaf ornaments. Just glue, glitter and tap off the excess.
Don’t they look beautiful when they catch the light?
I love the way this copper coloured leaf looks:
My helper for this craft was a 10 year old who came for a craft session after school, but this project is definitely easy enough to do with toddlers and preschoolers.
Kids of all ages love playing with dough, and they love glitter, so this craft is sure to please.
Now, we just have to decide how we’re displaying our glittered leaves in the daycare. I’ll show you some photos when we do!
More Fall Crafts for Kids
21 Easy Halloween Crafts for Toddlers and Preschoolers
19 Adorable Handprint Crafts for Fall
6 Fall Tree Crafts for Preschoolers
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Jackie is a mom, wife, home daycare provider, and the creative spirit behind Happy Hooligans. She specializes in kids’ crafts and activities, easy recipes, and parenting. She began blogging in 2011, and today, Happy Hooligans inspires more than 2 million parents, caregivers and Early Years Professionals all over the globe.
