Dried palm leaves have been taking interior design by storm.
If you guys have been following me on Instagram, you’ve probably seen my stories about dressing up my breakfast nook with some freshly cut palm leaves. As they start to wilt, I’ve been sun-drying them, but they don’t all look wonderful completely dried out. I want to have some dried palm leaf variety around my home and thought, what better way than DIY-ing my own faux palm leaves.
Things You’ll Need:
Step One:
Cut out a rectangular section of paper and trim it to an oval-like shape, leaving the bottom straight. The shape you cut out will will affect the overall shape of the faux palm when it’s complete! Have fun with this – try different shapes and see what you like the best!
Step Two:
Find the middle of the paper and fold it in half. This will be the starting point for your faux palm leaf.
Step Three:
We are going to start folding our palm leaf, like we did those fans we made in elementary. You just keep folding the paper over the base point, making sure the folds are the same size as each other.
Step Four: (Optional)
If you want your palms to have pointy-ends, versus the round shape, you can open it back up and cut out triangles at the top of your faux palm leaf.
Step Five:
Time to glue! On one side of the frond, start applying a bit of glue between each fold so it’s completely secure. One glue on one side. It helps to refold the paper, once the glue is applied to help secure a bond.
Note: In this step, you can also decide how far up you want to apply the glue – it can help create a tighter shape. As you’ll see in the image below, I went pretty far up and in the end, cut off a lot of the excess.
Step Six:
Next, I took a stick and figured out where I wanted to place it. To keep it realistic, I choose the fold in the center. From there, I glued the stick to the paper and kept it pressed the paper together with some leather string. You can use a chip bag clip, rubber band, twine, etc.
If you desire color, you can lightly coat the faux palm leaf with spray paint.
And there you have it! Now you are ready to experiment with all sorts of shapes, sizes, and maybe even color. I hope you guys will give this DIY a try. If you do, let me know in the comments.
How cute are these faux palm fronds?
