Hey everyone! It's another beautiful fall day...finally! Once again, I just have to say it, I'm so happy for this cool weather. Today I deep cleaned the kitchen, got it ready for another big bake (coming soon), helped stain our fence, enjoyed the over cast weather, and put up a few more decorations. I'm still trying to perfect my Thanksgiving tablescape.
Some of you may know, that I LOVE to decorate. Most holidays I decorate for, well all holidays I decorate for except not Arbor Day...or Columbus Day...but now that I think of it, I could probably decorate for those and that would be fun. Haha, anyways...my most favorite holiday to decorate for is Christmas and second favorite is fall! I love fall colors. Jewel tones are my thing. In my wardrobe, jewelry, shoes, sometimes even hair color (I once had a bit of dark purple hair). But I just love the color combinations that you can put together and you can really have fun. You could do fancy rooms with elegant color combinations, classic kitschy rooms where everything is over the top and has eyes, or a farm house look with lots of gingham. I like it all, but I lean towards the classic fall colors and I use a lot of leaves and floral arrangements. I do use faux flowers and garlands, I think they look okay. If you buy nice enough flowers it will look fine. I mean I would love to have fresh flowers everywhere in my house all the time, but that just is not in my budget.
I decorate everywhere but my favorite thing to decorate is the mantel! A good garland can go a long way, but I didn't have any kind of fall garland that wasn't just leaves. I had in my head that I wanted pumpkins and I wanted to use oranges, yellows, greens, that sort of the thing. Then when I was looking in the dollar spot at Target, always a dangerous thing to do, I found this wooden garland for three dollars. I liked the size of the pumpkins and the wood tones with the burlap string, but I thought it would look better if I painted it.
So I ended up making this really cool garland for the fireplace, it uses my classic colors but also has a bit of a retro twist to it with the gold. So here's what you do...
Materials:
- Wooden Garland from Target
- Paint in your desired colors
- Fabric ( use scraps)
- Rotary Cutter
- Cutting Board
- Clear Ruler
Steps:
- First decide on your color combo. I thought about doing more classic mid century colors like turquoise and pink with a bit of green, but then I thought about those colors with the other decor I already had on the fireplace and decided against it. I just wanted it to match with things I had already. So of course I chose, classic orange for the pumpkins.
- Now that you have your colors, undo the end of the burlap string and take off all your pumpkins, then paint them. I wanted to have some depth to the pumpkins, so I added a little brown to the orange paint I was using and painted that where it would be darker and blended best I could. Then I didn't want all the pumpkins to be the same, so some of them have more yellow. To do that I just painted the pumpkin orange, then with some yellow paint, painted on top of the orange.
- After your pumpkins are painted, cut your strips of fabric. I wanted mine to be pretty long so I cut them about 8 inches. Some of them are 2 inches wide and some are 1 inch wide.
- Next, now that your pumpkins are dry, string them back onto the original burlap string. Space them out evenly
- Tie the strips of fabric in-between the pumpkins.
- Hang up your new garland and enjoy!
I hope this you all like this cute little D.I.Y. I had fun with it, it didn't take a long time and the only thing I bought was the wooden garland.
Here are the photos, from materials, to painting, then lastly showing it hung up and then my little cutie, Chloe!
"Be still in the presence of the Lord, and wait patiently for him to act." - Psalm 37:7