AisA Academy

December 5, 2009

Two days ago while walking in Los Gatos, I came across a number of visually striking autumn leaves. Such a treat for me as I now live on the central California coast where the trees stay green all year long. I picked up a number of them with the thought that I’d take photos now and maybe paint them later.

Aren’t they gorgeous?

And now all together:

I wondered if there was any way to preserve the leaves themselves…maybe I’d frame them in a shadow-box frame. I searched on the the web and found this site:
Pressing Fall Leaves – How to Preserve the Beauty of Fall Foliage with instructions on pressing, drying, microwaving (!), and one that intrigued me most of all–using glycerin to preserve more color as well as shape and suppleness.

Finding the glycerin was the hardest part. None of the 5 drug or grocery stores in town carry it. Neither did the local hardware store which has a lot of arts and crafts as well as cooking items. After a number of phone calls, I finally located a craft store 30 minutes away which said they stock it.  I arrived only to find out that they were out!! A single 1 oz. bottle was located for me at another store location—-yet another 30 minute drive away! Thank goodness for books-on-tape so not all was a waste of time.

That one bottle was just enough to barely cover two leaves, so I did what I probably should have done first: emailed my homeschool list. Since glycerin is used in soap-making, quite a few people had some they could spare. I quickly grabbed some from my nearest friend and immersed the other leaves I wished to preserve then ordered more on-line. Now that I know this trick, I may want to preserve even more cool stuff.  Ya just never know. Maybe I’ll even make some soap.