How To Make Elegant Paper Leaves For Crafting

These elegant DIY paper leaves for crafting are so simple to make and with amazing results. Use them together with paper fruit or flowers, or even on their own! While metallic paper is an elegant option, you might like to go with brightly colored paper, or even recyled magazine pages? The main thing is to get crafting, make and bunch in many sizes and then the options are endless! Okay, lets make some accordion folded paper leaves! And yes, kids can do this too, just maybe slightly larger leaves depending on their manual dexterity.

Supplies For Making Accordion Folded Paper Leaves:

• lightweight paper such as origami paper, wrapping paper, magazine pages

• a glue stick

• scissors

How To Fold Accordion Paper Leaves:

1. Each leaf is made from one triangle. Two leaves can be folded from a square, but the results are less successful.
2. Make a triangle by cutting a square into two triangles, possibly folding the square and then cutting on the line.
3. The height of each leaf will be half the length of the hypotenuse, the long side of the triangle. These leaves are mostly 9cm long, so the long side of the triangles I used was 18cm.
4. Fold as follows: with the long side of the triangle parallel to the edge of the table, and the colored side of the paper face down, fold roughly 1/2 centimeter of paper up. Turn over and fold another 1/2 centimeter, and so on until entire triangle is accordion folded.
5. Apply glue to long side of folded triangle, and after finding mid point, simply fold in half and adhere the two sides to one another.
6. Voila! A leaf is made. Now go make more!

Ideas For How To Use DIY Accordion Folded Paper Leaves:

1. Make a vine with string or wire by simply glueing leaves to wire. Use this vine as a table runner, to decorate a chandelier, or as a base for a garland to hang on the wall.
2. Glue a branch to the back and use as a decorative element tucked into a cloth napkin for your festive tablesetting
3. Add a little note to the back and use as a gift tag, on a gift or attached to a gift bag or wine bottle.
4. Use as leaves for folded origami fruit.
5. Hang singly, and at multiple lengths from a dowel to make a wall hanging.
6. Make very large leaves and assemble a photo backdrop.
7. Make very large leaves, glue to dowels or skewers and use in a vase.
8. Use leaves to decorate a large cardboard tree wall mural.

There are truly so many ways to use this idea, so get those creative gears turning!