This year I am hosting Thanksgiving at my house. For the first time ever! I’ve been scouring Pottery Barn catalogs and Martha Stewart’s website for cute decorations I can make. Well, the other day I found the perfect decor–on a blog, of course! Sweet Life in the Valley made these adorable Autumn Wreaths out of cardboard and leaves. I thought I’d do the same—only switch it up just a bit!

First, we went on a leaf scavenger hunt. We have these gorgeous trees that look like fireworks at the front of our neighborhood. So we took a trek all the way down there (it took about 30 minutes with all the, “MOMMY! LOOK AT THIS MOST BEAUTIFUL LEAF EVER!”) scored a bag of leaves and then climbed back home. Thankfully my husband was coming home at the same time and rescued Lydia because she was “SO. TIRED. MOMMY.”

When we got home, I grabbed a Pampered Chef cardboard box I had been saving (it was just such a nice box!) and cut out the letters T, H, A, N, K, S.

Sweet Life in the Valley suggested using crafty glue to attach the leaves to the cardboard. And I think that would have been better. We only had a mini tube of crafty glue then had to replace it with school glue. We tried smearing the glue on the cardboard AND dabbing it right on the leaf. Either way worked fine.

Then we just pushed the leaves on as best we could. Lydia did the letter T while I did HANKS. Remarkably, her T turned out better than all mine put together. The more leaves you can squish on there, the better. If you can find newly fallen, semi soft leaves it will be much easier than using a crumbly crunchy old leaf.

I had this great idea to tape the letters to a ribbon vertically and then hang it on the front door so people could see it driving by. But our door is brown and the leaves are brown. So. Not so sure you can see it. I hung it on the back door to get the spacing correct and take a picture. Asa pulled off about 1/4 of the leaves during this process. Lydia and I are going to have to do surgery on some of them because it looks much less-preschool-craftish when you the cardboard is completely hidden by leaves.

Regardless, they turned out cute and it was super fun to make such a big craft. What do you think?

(This week I’m thinking of doing a video tutorial about how to easily cut letters out of paper…or cardboard as the case may be. Anyone interested?)