Autumn Felt Leaves Wreath

Make this beautiful autumn felt leaves wreath for your fall decor! The pretty lifelike leaves are made from felt and can be customized to any color of your choosing to go with your decor!

Hey y’all! I’m back today to share my last fall post for the year. I can’t believe we will be moving onto Christmas decor soon but that is how is goes. Once Halloween passes, Christmas is not far behind! You all got to see this lovely autumn felt leaves wreath last week when I posted my purple fall decor. Now today you get to see how to make it! 🙂

While this wreath does require some minimal sewing skills, it is actually really simple to make. The other nice thing about it is that nothing is glued in so you can take it apart easily after the season is over and still have a grapevine wreath and floral picks to use for other future projects.

I made mine using colors that matched my fall decor, but you can make it in the traditional fall colors, or whatever color scheme you want! It would be beautiful in reds, oranges and golds, wouldn’t it!? I love the detail that the sewing gives to the leaves, it makes them look very realistic. Although, if you don’t have a sewing machine, you could still make it without the veins too.

Supplies to make an autumn felt leaves wreath

*There are links to products in this post that I use or are similar to products I use. If you buy something from one of these links, I may make a small commission (with no additional cost to you) from the purchase. I will not recommend anything that I would not buy myself.

Felt Sheets in color of your choice – I bought mine at Hobby Lobby and used the colors burgundy, moss, copper canyon, sandstone, tan and ivory
18″ Grapevine Wreath
18 gauge Floral Wire Stems
Wire cutters
Scissors
Hot Glue Gun
Leafy stems for background – I found the pampas grass and purple fern stems at Walmart
Sewing machine
Matching thread to colors of felt
Pins
Leaf templates (get below)

Print the leaf templates

The first step is to print out the leaf templates onto regular printer paper. When you are printing, make sure you print this pattern at 100% to make sure the size is correct. Every printer is different so just make sure your settings are not set to ‘fit to page‘ or that the box is not checked letting your printer make changes. I gave you multiple options in kinds and sizes of leaves so use whichever ones you like or use them all! You will be sewing the actual paper onto the felt so you will need to print off multiple pages of each template.

Cut out the leaves

Make a rough cut around each separate leaf but not too detailed, you will cut around all the curves and edges after you sew the veins on the leaf. Pin the leaf onto the piece of felt and cut out the same rough leaf shape from the felt.

To save time and to figure out how many leaves I could get from one sheet of felt, I started to place the different leaves onto the whole felt sheet. Then I would pin them down and rough cut them.

Sew the veins onto the leaf template

To make the leaf more lifelike, I wanted to add some veins to it. The leaf shapes I picked for the templates all have great lines to follow with your sewing machine that were not too dense or intricate. If you have it, use matching thread to the color of felt that you are using for the leaves. If you don’t have a matching color, I would just use a neutral color like beige.

Place one of the leaves under the sewing machine and start at the stem of the leaf. I did not sew up the stem, I just started at the base of the leaf. Follow along the lines of the veins, first going up the leaf and branching off where the veins diverge from the main vein. Follow that branch up and then turn the leaf around 180 degrees and sew back down the line you just sewed until you get to another branch or the main vein.

Continue this until you have completed sewing all the veins on the leaf. You will end in the same place you started. Don’t worry if your lines don’t perfectly match up, you won’t be able to tell that once you tear off the paper template.

Cut out the leaf shape

After you get all your leaves sewn, next you will cut around them. I was lucky enough to have my mother-in-law in town to help me with this process. We zipped right through all the leaves in a couple hours with me sewing and her cutting! 🙂 It was simpler to cut closely around the whole leaf first and then come back to cut out the inside curves. Instead of trying to cut around the inside curves in one shot, come from one side and then the other. This makes it a lot easier!

Repeat this step with all the different colors and shapes of leaves. As you can see, some leaves are easier to sew and cut out than others. However, I think the variety of autumn leaves is what makes this wreath stand out!

When you have all the leaves sewn and cut out, next comes the fun part! You get to tear off the template. It is actually really satisfying when it comes off easily. LOL! Sometimes you come across one that is difficult though. My MIL found it easier to use a tweezer to assist in this part. It’s okay if a little bit of paper sticks in the sewn lines, that will be the back of the leaf anyway.

Prepare the wreath background

You can just use the felt leaves on the grapevine wreath by itself, but I thought it would look better with some leafy stems behind them. I found some cream faux pampas grass and purple fern stems at Walmart. You can just about imagine the quality of the pampas grass coming from Walmart, but it worked for what I needed it to! I needed to cut the stems down into more manageable sizes to stick into the wreath. Also, some of the pampas grass was stuck together so I had to separate and fluff the individual pieces a bit.

Next, I cut down the purple fern stems too.

This left me with a bunch of picks to use in the wreath instead of long stems.

First I inserted the pampas grass into the grapevine wreath spacing them out equally. These gave a nice full starting point for the rest of the picks.

Next, I added the purple fern picks. These brought in the purple color from my fall decor and helped to fill out the wreath a bit more before we add the leaf picks.

Before making the leaf picks, I wanted to place the leaves around the wreath to get an idea on where I wanted the leaves to go. This way I feel like the colors and shapes were spread out in the most balanced way possible. Move them around until you get them into the places you want.

How to make leaf picks

I wanted a way to make this wreath without having to glue anything down to it so I had to figure out how to attach the leaves another way. I came up with the idea to make leaf picks! This is brilliant, if I do say so myself, because then not only can I reuse the grapevine wreath in the future, I also now have leaf picks to use in the future too! 😉

To make the leaf picks, you will need some hot glue for this step as well as floral wire stems and wire cutters. Take some floral wire stems and cut them down into three pieces about 5″ long.

Take one of your felt leaves and place the end of the floral stem onto the stem of the leaf, creeping a little into the leaf itself. Remove the stem and lay a bead of glue down on the felt leaf where the floral stem was. Push the floral stem into the glue and fold and hold the leaf around the stem until the glue cools. If should hold it’s shape on the floral stem now.

Take your leaf pick and push it into place on the wreath where you took the leaf from. Make sure the pick is inserted into the wreath all the way. The pick is long enough that it will stay even when you pick the wreath up.

Repeat this step with all the leaves until they are all made into leaf picks and inserted. They may need to be adjusted when you pick up the wreath and can easily be moved around if you want to change the position. I hung mine on the mantel with a decorative water hyacinth wall hanging as a backdrop to coordinate with some of the dried floral in the garland. If you want to know more about the beautiful fall garland, check out my last post!

That’s it folks! What do y’all think? Is it something you would make? I really liked how it turned out! It reminds me of this paper bag leaf garland I made years ago and I am sure that this idea was born from that too. I will be back next with some Christmas decor but I haven’t even started on that yet! We have to wait until Halloween is over to officially decorate, right? 😉 Chat soon friends!