Capture the Beauty of Fall: Autumn Leaf Award Embedments
Throughout most of North America, the changing of the leaves marks the true arrival of fall. And did you know that those beautiful autumn leaves can be embedded? At Clearmount, we’ve been embedding leaves for decades, and let’s be honest: we couldn’t be a truly Canadian company if we didn’t!
In fact, our leaf embedments were one of the earliest projects I got involved in with Clearmount.
As part of our history, we used to have a souvenir line of pen stands, letter openers and more that had embedments of maple leaves, miniature CN Towers and SkyDome figurines. The only embedment that proved difficult to source was the maple leaf. As children, my sisters and I were paid 10 cents per leaf – which we all know seemed like millions to a small child! We were only given these two guidelines: 1) the leaves had to be whole and 2) the leaves had to as bright red as possible. We made tens of dollars!
The reason the leaves needed to be as bright red as possible is due to the tricky process involved in embedding organic material. Since there is heat involved, the sugars in the leaves get cooked, which can end up changing the colour of the leaves. Therefore, the leaves have to be selected at just the right time for them to look their absolute best in an embedment.
David and Ros took full advantage of their eager children to pick the perfect leaves. We would scramble around outdoors nabbing as many bright red, pest and worm-free leaves as we possibly could.
My leaf picking skills were dusted off last year when we had a big job that required a lot of leaves of a certain size and colour. The entire Clearmount team was on leaf duty and tasked to find the best autumn leaves to create outstanding maple leaf embedment awards. Thanks to inflation the price of a good leaf went up to a whopping $1! This, along with bragging rights going to the person who collected the most (and best) leaves served as great motivation to gather up those leaves quickly, seeing as we had such a short window of time to get those perfect red autumn leaves.