Fall leafy garland- version 3

This is my third try at making a fall leafy garland.

I tend put up my garland around September 1 and think it can carry you through Thanksgiving with adding/subtracting different holiday decorative elements.

I believe this assembly was the easiest way to make it.

Prior projects were sewing leaves and trying to wire zig zag spaced placement that results were not as uniform as I hoped. I might need to fix my other garlands if this glue method stores well and holds up.

Paint

Took the Walmart and DT bright red yellow orange fabric leaves in the cellophane bag began laying them out on cardboard and primed the leaves with a neutral. I used gray acrylic applied both back and front. After that dried they were touched up with metallic - I used silver and copper. In my situation I just put the mettalics on one side- as it was single sided viewing (fast splotches of metallic paint on the cardboard likely unintentionally transferred onto the other side.)

It was a sloppy job using a foam brush and unintentionally getting fingertips painted. Gloves might be helpful

Prior years I had spray painted the metallics on outdoors.

Stringing

I also decided to remove the backside plastic veining in the larger leaves and save that for another re-purpose. After the leaves were dried they were pierced with a large sewing needle about 6-8 at a time and strung on thin 26 gauge wire. After all my stacks of painted leaves were threaded on the wire they were spaced out and hot glued to the wire on the designated (gray) backside.

Optional holiday additions

24 DT wooden JOL were painted on both sides.

After base coating with orange acrylic some were shadowed with watercolors.

Others were accented with magic matkers in three different colors for definition.

Sealed with 2X matte clear.

After the garland was hung temporary Halloween ornaments added.

8 JOL were placed at the back door.

Some bats were placed on the previous years front window leaf garland. This is the garland that was machine sewn strung on a decorative cording. The bats were a DT plain felt cut outs and some were wooden clip-on clothespins

The felt bats received some details with silver metallic paint marker, googly eyes and some upside down white pip berries for fangs. Upside down white berries make wonderful dimensional fangs..

more JOL

The remaining JOL‘s were dispersed around the house.

It could be a game to try to find all 24.