All Things Fall

I love Fall! The colors of the leaves, apples, pumpkins, and so much more. This will most likely be the last Fall for us in the DC area. There is a chance we'll come back, but just in case we don't, the kids and I made a bucket list of all the things we wanted to do during this lovely season.

I was surprised and really happy that our oldest suggested we take family pictures. What kid tells their parent that, "We should take family pictures?" Apparently ours do. All the other kids enthusiastically agreed. Hopefully, they keep that attitude when we check it off our list. I just realized that taking pictures during the Fall season has turned into a tradition. We always take a shot near a gorgeous huge tree in our backyard with the woods as our background. We're going to miss the view of this backyard.

I'm definitely feeling nostalgic and excited about all the upcoming changes. While we haven't had our family pictures taken yet, we've had a lot of energy and have already crossed off a lot of items on our bucket list. One of them was to create a painting of a tree with the help of many hands (I guess I should say fingers):

I apologize in advance about the quality of pictures. My camera's battery was dead and we couldn't find the charger. Anyhow, I love how our craft turned out and so do the kids. I think it will help us remember of the times we spent here for the past two years. It will remind me of our beautiful tree. Here's how we made our fun painting:

First we painted the limbs and the details. I got the idea to do this project from pinterest (I'd have linked you straight to the source, but it's spam). You can see they didn't do any details on the trunk or limbs. I like both versions with and without the additional gray. Either way cover your trunk and limbs with tape. We left some parts (as seen below) uncovered so the leaves could cover parts of it. We ended up covering anything that wasn't covered with tape.

Then the kids and I rolled up our sleeves and we started getting red leaves on our canvas...

Then we added yellow, orange, green, and a little brown and tried to let it dry a bit.

Then we started to pull up our tape. By the way, we used both painters tape and duct tape and both worked just fine.

Almost done pulling off all the tape...

After we finished pulling off tape, we added leaves to the top where the one trunk was completely uncovered. We also added leaves to the sides of the canvas. After it was all dry, we hung it up. The kids were super proud and happy with their art work. If you have kids (or not) and are looking for a fun and easy craft to do this Fall, I'd definitely recommend trying this out. It's easy, fast, and a whole lot of fun!