I’m so happy to welcome my friend Nicole here today for a guest post, sharing her step by step process for making beeswax leaves. She inspired us to dip leaves in beeswax for the first time last fall, we made beeswax leaves again this year, and now it’s something that B and I look forward to doing together every autumn. (By following Nicole’s tutorial last year, our beeswax leaves still have their original color, a little more than a year later! I should add that they hung on a wall away from direct sunlight. You can see Nicole’s original post, Golden October, here.) I’m grateful to Nicole for joining us here today. I’ll hand it over to her now. 

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Hi everyone! I am so excited and honored to be here sharing one of my family’s favorite traditions with all of you. Thank you Taryn for having me! This tradition of ours started back in October 2009 when we moved across the country from Virginia to the PNW for our children to attend school at the Portland Waldorf School. We attended their annual Harvest Festival where we learned how to preserve autumn leaves beautifully with beeswax. Ever since that day our autumns have always been filled with leaf collecting nature walks and a home smelling of beeswax. We have since moved (yet again) and are currently living in a desert climate where it is harder to find our autumn leaf treasures but that just makes the ones we do find even more special.

{Pictures from their leaf hunting walk last fall. Nicole said: “Autumn leaves around here are few and far between. Our yard here is very bare – quite different from the scene of our previous yard. Unable to stand it any longer, the children and I decided to take a leaf hunting walk the other day to find these elusive autumn treasures. Jackpot! A bit too old and crunchy to beeswax but perfect for playing in! None of us wanted to leave all of this autumn goodness, so we gathered up a bagful, a skirtful and an armful to bring back home with us for backyard leaf play. Totally normal, right?! And of course we dipped some leaves in beeswax to preserve the beauty of autumn just a bit longer! The leaves weren’t in the best shape but really, beggars can’t be choosers!”}

If you would like to join in the fun and preserve your own leaves – it’s really quite fun and easy to do. I would recommend it for age four and above. My youngest child is four but he has been watching us do it for so long that he has the hang of it already. He did get a little burn last autumn though, when he touched the side of our beeswax pot (and that is the reason we started using a crockpot instead.) Which brings me to supplies:

leaves – The softer the better, if they are crunchy they won’t last as long. You can press the leaves if you wish but I haven’t found it necessary.
beeswax – We buy it in one pound bricks locally and melt it down as is. If need be, we will cut it up before melting it (for example, if the wax is too big for the pot).
an old pot or crock pot you can devote fulltime to beeswax – You’ll never be able to get the beeswax out of it so it will become your permanent beeswax pot. You will store your beeswax in it when not is use, too. We found our pot at a thrift store for a couple of bucks.
an oilcloth tablecloth, newspaper or anything else that will protect the surface you are working on – Beeswax is a pain to scrape off your surfaces, and this will be a messy project. Trust me!
wax paper – We have used aluminum foil as well but the wax paper works best.
thread or cord if you plan on making a garland – We also like placing beeswaxed leaves on our nature table or taping them in our windows like they are falling from the trees. There are so many things you can do with them!

Basically you’ll warm your beeswax in your pot or crockpot. The crockpot takes a couple of hours to melt the wax but you can walk away from it which is nice, while the pot placed on your stove top over med-low heat will melt the wax faster but you have to stay right there with it to make sure it doesn’t splatter or burn. If you do happen to burn it, burnt beeswax can be saved by straining it through cheesecloth to get all the burnt pieces out of your wax.

Make sure your beeswax is nice and hot, if it is not hot enough the beeswax will create a thick layer on your leaves, not allowing the autumn colors to show through. If this happens just heat the beeswax up longer and then you can re-dip the leaf to melt the excess beeswax off.

Once your wax is melted, start dipping your leaves. You only need to dip them once, (too many layers and they become heavy and cloudy looking) then let them drip over the pot for a moment before placing them onto your wax paper to dry. Make sure to get the whole leaf so it will be fully  preserved. I highly recommend also dipping the tip of the leaf stem after the leaf has cooled down (I have mentioned this in one of my many beeswax leaves posts), it really helps the leaves retain their color longer. We have been know to keep our beeswaxed leaves up through the next spring!

Once they are all dry and cooled down display them on your nature table, in a basket on your dinner table, strung up on a garland or however you wish! We used a few of our leaves to make a small garland by threading hemp cord through the actual leaves (instead of our usual garland method of stringing leaves on by using a needle and thread inserted into the tip of their stems). After I had the leaves on the cord I added some beeswax acorns we made with a candy mold. To glue them in place I just dripped some hot beeswax on the back of them where the cord would go and then pressed the cord into the hot beeswax with my fingers (all these years of knitting and sewing have rendered my fingertips numb to pain.) After it was pushed in, I put a couple more drops of beeswax on top of the cord to really keep it in place.

Just don’t hang them in a window that receives hours of strong sunlight, the leaves will brown in a matter of days. We learned this lesson the hard way after our move to sunny southern Idaho from the PNW (where sun wasn’t really an issue).

Let me know if you have any questions!

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Nicole Spring is a wife, Waldorf homeschooling mama to three (soon four!) sweet little ones, homemaker of the radical kind, knitter, cook, seamstress, student of life as well as her children, crafter, girl of all trades… and always with a camera in hand to document their days so they can look back at these glorious yet exhausting times. She blogs over at Frontier Dreams where you can find lots of crafting inspiration!