Maple Tree for the Architect's Alley

After looking at the back alley and especially the space above the newly constructed Cricut fence, I felt the back alley was missing something.  So I decided I would attempt to make a maple tree for the alley. 

 

I knew it would mean making a lot of maple leaves, and with only two button punches for maple leaves, I thought my fingers would be very sore doing it that way.

So on to the Cricut.  I found a maple leaf in Design Space and reduced it to three sizes and duplicated enough until I filled in an entire page.  Each page had about 530 leaves on it, so I cut three pages of leaves giving me about 1600 leaves

I tried adding some dry brushing, but I found the paper not accepting of the technique, but I'm hoping once they are popped off the sheet, it will be fine.

The scrap paper left from the printed sheets had lots of blank spaces, so I decided to brave it and use my punches to punch additional leaves in those blank areas.  I also liked that it gave me another size and slightly different shape to the leaves.  I figure I can get about another 800 leaves from the scraps. 

Then I had to put veins in the leaves using a stylus, this took a little bit of time.

I cut a bunch of 2-3" wires in both green and brown wires in a varying degree of wire sizes.  Then I built small branches by adding the smaller leaves at the top of these branches and the larger leaves at the bottom.

So the first 30 branches are done, with each branch taking about 10-12 leaves, which means I have enough leaves punched to make about 200 branches.  I don't know if I'll need that many, but I'm prepared.

For a tree trunk I'm utilizing something that I've used quite a bit in the past year in a number of my miniature projects.  Last fall Hurricane Bruce came through my province leaving a lot of damage, including taking my favourite tree in my garden, my Black Willow Tree.  Here's a shot of it when it was smaller, but it grew to be twice this height.

It survived winters like this.

But Hurricane Bruce reduced the tree to this.  So over the past year since I lost my tree, I've been recycling the branches and wood into my miniature projects.  The loft will also use a branch from this tree for the trunk and main branches of my maple tree outside the Architect's Loft.

Wish me luck as I continue to shape the leaves, make the wired branches and attach them to this special tree trunk.  

More on my progress in my next post.

Until the next time.....

Wanda