Sherry's Leaf Workshop

Lots of fun was had by all who attended Kay and Sherry's Leaf making workshop on the 18th. She needs thousands of leaves for her fiber art group in Ketchican, who have a grant to make a 17 foot fiber tree for the children's section of the new public library. It will be decorated with book characters, words, flowers and leaves. Sherry has been doing artist in residence programs with fourth graders to make leaves also.

We made a creative mess with paints, foam stamps and glue. Sherry had samples and directions for us, and a leaf template. We worked on phone book pages and washed acrylic paints over the paper.

After laying the washes out to dry, we began the second layer of stamping, with foam stamps, make up foam triangles, plastic fly swatters, alphabet stamps and other items.

The next part was to layer the painted paper with fabric, and insert a wire stem between the layers. We used gel medium to glue the layers together and the leaves were hung on a chain link fence to dry.

We made over 90 leaves to this point and took a break for lunch. They still need to be trimmed to shape, and coated with more gloss medium to seal. Sherry had an assortment of finished leaves for us to see.

Kay made a wonderful lunch of vegie soup, sandwiches and pumpkin pie cake with Sherry wielding the whip cream can. After lunch the ladies went back to paint more paper and hopefully finished hundreds more. Here is the recipe for the pumpkin dessert, by popular demand. Pumpkin Pie Cake 16oz can of pumpkin - 1 can sweetened condensed milk - 1 1/2 cups sugar - 1 tsp cinnamon and a 1/4 tsp ground cloves - 2 eggs - Mix and pour into a 9" x 13" greased or Pam coated pan. Sprinkle one package white/yellow/or spice cake mix (with pudding type) over the pumpkin mixture, Dry! Drizzle one cube melted butter or margarine on top of dry cake mix, Sprinkle one cup chopped walnuts on top. Bake at 350' then cool, serve with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.