Capturing fall in a bottle

Our company had a fall themed Glowforge contest, so I made this fall tree under a glass cloche:

Designing the base was very fun, I borrowed this awesome Arabic design book that shows the geometry of how these are broken down so that I could recreate it in Illustrator:

Then I just had to find a tree and make some leaves. I did a simple kind cross piece slot tree, then modified a Canadian flag and cut a WHOLE LOT of maple leaves out of a piece of thick watercolor paper that I colored up with fallish colors:

Then I got a tweezers and super glue and started gluing! Right around here was when it looked like a weird #nailedit kind of project and I started to loose heart:

But it turns out that putting a glass cloche over anything makes it look SUPER FANCY and awesome, so it all came together!

(It was very hard to get a good picture of this in the office, but handy that we had fake fall trees everywhere.) ((Also, this was actually last fall and it took forever for me to write this post because I didn’t have the heart to post it out of season ))