Kidnap the Magic: Wonderland Leaves

With Easter less than a week away, you might be thinking about spring and summer decorating motifs for your home and garden. It's the season of leaves and flowers, and for some people, there's no need to be weird about it—real plants and/or realistic silk floral will be fine. But some of us might prefer something a little more...specific. More stylized. More relevant to our unique interests.

More like the art of Mary Blair, amirite?

 Mmmmmm...artistic...

Disney, inexplicably, does not seem to produce for sale any sort of replica of the wonderfully iconic giant leaves decorating the Alice in Wonderland queue. They would make great little accessories for floral arrangements, model railways, scrapbooking, or any number of other hobbies, but...nada. If you want some, you'll have to make your own. Fortunately, that doesn't have to be hard at all.

As presented, this project is simple enough for kids to do. Well, not the youngest kids (it involves sewing needles)...let's say eight and up? You know your own kids best. Anyway, I've included some variations for more advanced crafters toward the end. But for now, let's focus on the basic version.

Unfortunately, I haven't gotten a chance to make these myself, so I don't have any helpful photos for you. But the concept is simple enough. If you decide to try this out, please let me see the results!

You will need:

• Felt squares in the color(s) of your choice. If you're going for the Alice in Wonderland queue look, you'll want pink, lavender, and mint green/aqua. I recommend pastels or lighter shades in any case.
• Ball-point pen.
• Chenille stems (also known as pipe cleaners) in colors that harmonize with your felt.
• White glue or tacky glue.

Technically optional, but pretty indispensible if you want maximum accuracy to the designs uses in the park, is a:

• Printer.

Ready? Let's begin!

The Alice queue leaves come in four basic shapes.* For your benefit, I located the best flat-on view of each one that I could find, and then contracted with a local graphic designer** to convert them into user-friendly outlines, presented here in easily downloadable form:

1. Adjust them to the size you want and print one of each. Cut them out to use as templates with your felt. Do not cut along the vein lines—instead, use your pen (or a heavy needle) to poke holes in them, like a connect-the dots picture.
2. Alternately, if you want to try designing your own leaf shapes, go for it! Here's another screencap from the movie with some hopefully inspirational leaves in it, very different from the ones used for the ride but still bursting with Blair style:
   
   
   
   
   
3. Position the templates on your felt squares and lightly trace around them with the ball-point pen. Also mark through the holes in the vein lines.
4. Remove the templates and trace through the dots—again, lightly, to fill in the vein lines.
5. Cut out the shapes.
6. Now get some chenille stems in the color(s) you want for your leaf veins. Lay one out along the inked lines and carefully bend it to follow them, cutting it with your scissors (or small wire cutters) as needed. When you run out of one stem, repeat the process with another until you have enough curly segments to cover all the veins.
7. Do the same with the edges of the leaves. If you're copying the look of the ride queue, your edges and your veins should be the same color.
8. Using sparing amounts of glue, attach the chenille stems to the leaves. Allow a few hours for the glue to dry completely.

There! You now have a few brightly colored, fuzzy, Alice in Wonderland leaves, suitable as components for further craft projects! The wires in the chenille stems allow you to twist or bend the leaves into different positions for more variety. Try “planting” them in a block of floral foam in a flowerpot, attaching them to hairclips, or building an entire Wonderland-themed shoebox diorama.

Variations

• Instead of the chenille stems, try cutting the veins and edges out of self-adhesive felt. This will be delicate work, probably requiring an X-acto knife, so attempt with caution!
• Instead of the chenille stems, use embroidery! I recommend stem stitch for the veins and blanket/buttonhole stitch for the edges.
• Quilt your leaves out of patterned cottons, with the quilting stitches making up the veins.
• Cut them out of heavy, textured scrapbooking paper and draw the veins with high-quality felt-tip markers. Alternately, build them out of layers of paper pasted together—outline shape, leaf background color, veins.
• Make them out of polymer clay. When fresh out of the oven they will still be slightly malleable for a short time.

Obviously you have a lot of options when it comes to creating Alice in Wonderland-inspired leaves. This makes it all the more puzzling that Disney doesn't produce any for sale.

* And several advanced shapes, added in various refurbishments over the years.

** Okay, fine, I asked my sister to do it. She has an art tablet.