DIY: Touch of the Tropics

Create fabulous paper foliage with this tutorial and free template download.

Each season, our team of creative experts, buyers and trend forecasters work together to create product stories at the forefront of current trends. Once the collection is finalized, it is up to our merchandising and creative teams to figure out the most impactful way to tell the story of that trend. Behind the scenes, there is a flurry of activity. Flooring and wall colors or treatments are chosen, props are selected and what was once a pile of product comes together into a cohesive, meaningful story.

This summer, our focal trend was Black Sand, an elevated take on tropical. This story used botanical motifs in black and white with pops of green and gold. When planning our window display for Atlanta Market, we chose to use large paper cutout tropical leaves to cover the wall behind the product. In total, we hand cut around 250 leaves for the window and the showroom entrance. We received so many comments and compliments on the leaves, that we decided to share how you can recreate this look in your own store.

What you need:
• Vector leaf graphic template
• Printer for making paper template
• Large cutting board
• Pen knife (with lots of extra blades)
• Pen or pencil
• Large paper roll (we used Savage Widetone seamless background
paper from our photo studio)

Step One:
First decide what size you want your leaves and resize the vecor
graphic to match. Print leaves and cut them out as your tracing
template.

Note: Unless you have a large format printer, you will need to print
the leaves in sections and tape them together.

Step Two:
Roll out appropriate length of paper and tape it down over your cutting
surface. On the desk we used as a surface, we could trace around five
leaves on a sheet of paper.

Hint: We doubled our paper to cut two leaves at a time.

Step Three:
Play Tetris with your paper templates and trace your leaves on.

Step Four:
Cut out leaves using pen knife.

Step Five:
Iron on low if needed to flatten the finished leaves.

Step Six: Hang leaves overlapping them to create dimension and texture.