My kids love doing crafts. Seasonal crafts are a fun way to get the kids involved in making some colorful decorations for our home. These stained glass tissue paper leaf sun catchers are cheerful and easy to make with card stock and strips of tissue paper.
To make leaf shaped sun catchers, choose a few real leaves from your backyard maple tree. Any large sized leaves will do. Trace around the leaves onto a dark colored piece of card stock. Tracing around real leaves allows your stained glass tissue paper leaf sun catchers to look more realistic and each shape will be different.
Cut out the leaf shape and then cut out the inside of the leaf, leaving a 1″ border all the way around. This leaf cut-out will be the base for gluing on colorful pieces of tissue paper.
Cut up an assortment of colored tissue paper into small squares or diamond shapes. A stained glass leaf sun catcher will be prettier if you glue alternating different colors inside the card stock leaf shape. You could also make a monochromatic leaf sun catcher using all reds/oranges or all blues/greens pieces of colored tissue paper.
Spread glue along the edge of the card stock leaf shape and start gluing pieces of tissue paper along the edges, working your way towards the center. You can add dabs of glue to the edges of the tissue paper pieces to connect everything together.
Important! If you are working on another piece of paper, be careful to not let the leaf sun catcher dry and get glued onto the piece of paper. You can use a piece of parchment paper as a workspace to fully prevent the sun catcher from sticking to your work surface.
Allow your finished tissue paper leaf sun catcher to fully dry on a piece of parchment paper. Kids can help hang up these stained glass leaf sun catchers in the window to give your home some festive fall color!
Interactive Fall Kids Project
Making leaf sun catchers is a great way to get kids involved in a fall craft and practice basic skills.
Cutting paper helps kids practice using a pair of scissors and cutting precisely along a line. You can also teach kids about how to safely handle a pair of scissors. Cutting up the tissue paper is good practice for working with delicate materials and cutting out small shapes.
Arranging the tissue paper encourages kids to create a thoughtful design and consider color placement. Overlaying different colors of tissue paper helps kids learn about mixing colors to create new colors. Each leaf sun catcher will show off different color combinations and unique overlapping shapes.
Gluing everything together helps kids learn how to productively use small amounts of glue and use consideration to not create too much of a mess. The creative skills required to place each square of tissue paper and glue them together is great practice of precision and fine motor skills.
Finishing the project is a fun accomplishment and your kids will be excited to show off their creation in your home!
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It’s easy to make DIY stained glass tissue paper leaf sun catchers!
Katie is a writer and influencer based in beautiful Coeur d’Alane, Idaho. She enjoys DIY projects, photography, decorating and going on family adventures. She feels blessed to be a wife, a stay-at-home mom to three kids and a Pacific Northwest lifestyle blogger.
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