DIY Workshop #1 – “My Canadian Forest Herbarium”
Virtual Playtime

Material
Here are the material you will need: 

🗞 Newspaper
🟦 coloured cardboard paper
✂️ a pair of scissors and a tube of glue
🍂 a dozen dead leaves and small branches collected during a walk 

Steps: 

1. During a walk around your home, in the park or in the countryside, observe the ground and the trees in search of leaves. 
Collect about ten leaves in various shapes and colours that you like. You can add a few branches or blades of grass to your selection. 

2. Once at home, place the collected plants between two pages of newspaper and cover the whole thing with a pile of books to compress. Within 5 days, the leaves will be dry, flattened and ready for our herbarium! 

Tip: If you take the leaves on a rainy day, they will take longer to dry.

3. After 5 days, carefully remove the leaves from the newspaper and lay them flat on a table. Also choose a background for your landscape from the coloured cardboard papers and put it on the table.

4. Take a few minutes to observe the shapes of each dead leaf, the variety of sizes and colours, the richness of detail. Let your imagination guide you: each leaf, each branch can take on the appearance of a tree, a bush, an animal or a campfire… 

5. Think about the Canadian forest landscape you want to create with these elements and their arrangement on the cardboard paper. 

If you wish, you can add a small hut or characters in the middle of the natural elements. To do this, you need a pair of scissors, a tube of glue and several sheets of cardboard & coloured paper to cut out freely.

6. First, try out and superimpose all these elements without gluing them together to create your ideal landscape. 

Tip: Remember to place the larger sheets first so that they don’t hide the smaller ones!

7. Once you’re happy with the composition, go on to the gluing step! Apply a few dots of glue to the leaves and branches before fixing them to your coloured background and give shape to your herbarium landscape. 

8. Let your creation dry for a few hours before lifting it off the table. Don’t forget to sign your work and share it with us! 

👀 To help you recreate a Canadian Forest Herbarium, you can explore the sites of Parks Canada, Hinterland Who’s Who and Natural Resources Canada.