How to emboss nature to create stunning texture and patterns

Have you ever tried embossing nature? In this case, embossing is the art of molding a design or pattern onto a surface or object. Embossing can turn something rather plain into an object that has added texture and beauty.

If you’ve been to my blog before, you would know that I don’t think nature is at all boring but I was curious to see if embossing would work on nature.

To my delight, it worked a treat and my children and I made some beautiful delicate designs on leaves and flowers.

They’re perfect as a simple gift from a child to a grandmother, for example, especially if you emboss them and then cut the leaf into a heart shape, like we’ve done here.

Here’s how we did it.

 

What you’ll need

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• Nature (leaves and flowers)
• Embossing stencil
• Art hammer

How to emboss nature

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1. Collect some leaves and flowers from around your garden. Try collecting nature of different sizes, colours and shapes.
2. Place the leaf (or flower) in the embossing folder.
3. Use the art hammer or something equivalent to press the folder together. I also ran over it with a long and hard piece of plastic to ensure I had pushed the pattern into the leaf completely. Tip: Be firm but not too firm or you might punch holes through the leaf. Every leaf it different too, so let your children experiment to find out which leaf makes the best embossing marks.
4. Take the leaf out and see the spectacular results.
5.  When you’re embossing flowers be much more gentle. We only placed the petals in the embossing folder, not the whole flower and pressed the petals in stages. Again, you’ll have to experiment with the flowers that you have access to.
6. Once you’ve embossed some nature, you can use them in further nature craft activities, like making shapes with nature, making bracelets, nature crowns and more.

Go on, try to emboss nature. It’s super fun and so pretty. Perfect as decorate garlands, decorations on gifts and even in bunches of floral decorations.