DIY Fairy Light Mason Jar W/Leaves

I wanted to make a fairy light out of a mason jar and put in leaves for a woodland-ish sort of feel. Thanks to Instructables, we received a shipment of Dremel tools for a Dremel Build Night at the Rabbit Hole Hackerspace and decided this would be a great time to experiment with making leaves!

Tools for Leaves only:

Dremel Rotary Tool with sanding bit

Bandsaw

Scrap pieces of thin wood

Howard's Feed-n-Wax

Items for Fairy Light:

Large Mason Jar

String of Fairy Lights (easily bought on Amazon/Ebay)

Using the bandsaw, I cut out basic leaf shapes. I didn't use any particular pattern, just whatever I thought a leaf should look like. I then used the Dremel to sand the edges of the leaf.

With the Dremel sanding bit, I experimented with both creating more definition with the veins of the leaf and the leaf itself. I found that it looked more dramatic to do the leaf "meat" rather than the veins. So that's what I did!

So once I had one side done, I did the other side, but wanted to add a bit more definition, so I alternated where the leaf "meat" was defined. In the second picture, you can see that focusing on that caused the leaf to look rippled, much like leaves are in the fall.

The process is pretty zen, just cut out shapes, sand, repeat! Different woods make different colored leaves. Oak tends to give a reddish color, Poplar tends to do greenish/purples, and Maple tends to do paler colors. It becomes a very nice pastel smattering of fall-colored leaves.

After having made quite a few leaves, I learned how to add a little finesse to the leaves. For vein branching, when sanding, towards the end of the vein, I rotated the sanding bit anywhere from 45-90 degrees off the angle of the main leaf vein I had been shaping.

You can see the result best in the second picture!

So I bought a single string of fairy lights which I like better than normal Christmas lights and stuffed them haphazardly into the mason jar. I then put the leaves randomly around and among the fairy lights. Voila! Super easy and it looks beautiful!