How I Decorate For Autumn!

Hello!

I bet you’re confused–it’s Monday but I’m not publishing a music playlist! I still think you’ll enjoy the change though, especially if you love decorating as much as me.

In September, I was able to get some fall décor for my room and I said towards the end of the post that I was going to hopefully show you where each item would end up, byway of a little tour. I’m not yet comfortable showing off my entire room, instead I’m just going to explain my way of thinking (or at least try to!) into how I wanted everything to look in certain areas, plus share with you how everything started out and the changes I made throughout the dreary season!

Let’s start with my door, because I have the only thing that has never changed places since it arrived to our house, and it is the pumpkin styled wreath that has faux berries, flowers, and leaves placed in the middle of the structure. It gives you a little sneak peek into what you will surely see once you go into the room.

I have really enjoyed seeing this wreath every day, and will probably be really sad to see it go once we get our Christmas decorations out sometime this week. As of now, I do not have a Christmas wreath and I don’t know if I will have one at the moment, but if I do find the perfect one, I’ll be posting it on my social media for you all to see of course!

One of my favorite things about my room is that I have a space in between two of my large treasures that allows me to not only have a Christmas tree but a good size autumnal display as well.

My mom purchased this absolutely beautiful sunflower rug when we first moved in two years ago, because the rug next to my bed blends into the floor but when we transferred from the bed to the wheelchair or commode–because we tried both!–my feet were slipping and sliding all over the place! What was really funny about this, is that on the tag it says, “non-slip” and although the rug never moved, we knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to keep it there! The material is like velvet, so really fuzzy and soft but apparently not great for what we do in front of the bed, so it was moved by the window and would be used for decoration for all holidays.

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I have loved only having one window, in my room,. In our old house, I actually had two windows, but I only used one because the other was covered with plastic to keep out the cold in the colder months.

The placement is perfect in many ways, if you pay attention to my “Three Good Things” on Instagram and Facebook in the evenings, you know how much I like to bird watch as I have quite a few bird friends that live in and around our backyard, but it is also the best backdrop for décor and even for my blog photos!

I have a translucent curtain with orange-y sunflowers all throughout; once I found it, I thought it would be different from having the normal thicker and darker shades of fabric and the latest addition are white cord lights all around the sides and front of it, which makes you feel cozy like instantly. I cannot tell you how happy I am when it’s nighttime and see the whole room illuminate in this warm glow and I feel so safe inside compared to how I felt in our old house.

Anyways, I have always wanted to decorate that area for the holidays. Christmas is easy because it is the perfect width to support a tree that’s both small and tall as you’ve probably seen in my posts last year. However, for autumn, I wanted to create a little oasis, that would blend in with the curtain, lights, and rug and thankfully I found some stuff that was perfect to showcase my love of fall.

When the stacked pumpkins arrived at our door, I knew that they would be perfect in the space in front of the window, but finding something that would separate them a little was somewhat difficult. I have another faux flower arrangement in a basket, and I’ve had this for years and have used it as props for blog posts but never had a place where they looked like that on purpose so I thought of putting it in between the pumpkins and placing other autumnal things around them. It took me a bit to arrange everything together, but I did get it all together where I thought I was happy with, but then within a week after taking my pictures of the finished project, I was given even more stuff to spruce up the piece again.

This is what it originally looked like for a good week and half until I changed most of the layout.

So….

My mom went to work one day and sometimes, they do little games and she had won this beautiful plump black and white plaid throw pillow that is somewhat heavy to lift but has a nice design on the front: it reads, “Pumpkin Patch” in between a dark grayish truck full of pumpkins (my nephew is in love with the truck by the way!) and at the bottom of it, has the words “pumpkins, apples, and hay rides” and it is just the cutest thing ever! It doesn’t match anything in our living room, so mom instantly just gave it to me and I had it for one day before I came up with a brand new plan.

The day I worked on this, I was committed to take on the challenge of moving this pillow around and switching out various things by my window to make my vision happen. I kept my pumpkins the way they were, but moved out the flower arrangement and put the pillow in its spot. Now here was the tricky part. The pillow did not want to stay still once I got it in the right place. Thanks to the silky rug underneath it, all it wanted to do was slide down as I was moving everything around! It was annoying but I got through it in one piece! I ended up having to squeeze everybody together to make sure it stayed upright, and that’s why you’ll the pumpkins sitting very close to it.

The flowers I moved to the right side because on the other side I had another project that has taken me ages to finish, but it is very heavy and takes up quite a bit of room on that left corner so the only thing I had that could fit on that side was a witch figurine that my nana gave me a few years ago that has never had the best luck at finding the right home either, so it was amazing luck that everything worked great together and made the display even better than I had dreamed the night before!

And now I can show you the final result that is in front of my lone window.

During the week my mom received the pillow, we went up north to visit with family for a couple of days, and my cousin Amy, her wife Danielle and their kids came over on the second day we were there and they brought these cute wood cravings in different Halloween-y designs for everyone to do together. Nolan painted the cutest pumpkins ever and my nana and I worked on my witch, I did the sides in brown while I painted the front in this purple-blueish hue and added a lot of white dots everywhere! Inside each craving are lights that are battery operated and mine flicker with multiple colors at once and even though I was slightly angry I added so many dots, it actually worked out great with the lights in the background. We placed it in front of the TV because I don’t have a bigger space for it, maybe I can come up with a better solution next year.

The final item to arrive and put up was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever encountered while decorating and DIYing!

As I mentioned in my haul, I absolutely adore the moon. I have always wanted something that was moon related in my room, whether it was a poster or banner, I didn’t care. However, I found out through this, that it pays to look at reviews before buying because it was a disaster!

When it arrived, we opened the package and it didn’t come with instructions so we relied on YouTube for help, which was fine! The next part was getting them attached to their pedant and this was really irritating both of my parents and what made things worse was we had three that broke upon clipping together and then on top of that, you have one side that is very shiny gold and the back is grey and dull which at first, it was okay, until you went to put them on the wall and they were facing the wrong direction.

We were going to put it underneath my TV, because the base and we were hoping that the gold line would be able to fit across the mantle. We had made that decision after my mom lost the long cord, and after finding it back in the box it came in, we were back to my idea that was having it hang above my bed and it does fit between the long section of the wall and thanks to the Command hooks, it was easy to arrange it like a theater stage curtain with a rounded effect. You could easily have the two markers but I saw an image on Pinterest that had a third hook in the middle so it makes that loop design on each side and I really loved it that way so that’s what we agreed on!

Once we got it hung up on the wall, we kept it there for a bit before deciding on how to fix our next problem. The worst part of the whole thing, was ours had some type of red markings on at least four pieces! Since we were still painting pumpkins during this time, I was allowed to do a little experiment and use purple paint to hopefully solve our issue; and it happened to be the greatest thing because it didn’t matter if they were facing each other or not, at least they were one color. I painted 10 moon phases with two coats of a royal purple on both sides – while the middle moon was left out of the family day of painting and was only covered with one coat with the same paint. This one is more purple-y because of this decision but everybody is in agreement, it makes it look more unique because its the full moon.

Here was the before and after pictures of the moon banner!

In my mini haul, I said I had bought a throw blanket and a T-Shirt but I don’t have any photos of those things. I am hoping I will maybe do a OOTD for you but we’ll have to see what happens because December is coming and I have a lot of Blogmas and New Year posts to get up soon so I might have to do it on Instagram or something.

I hope you have enjoyed this post, and got a kick out of what goes on in my mind as far coming up with a plan and fixing issues while decorating my own room! Again, I have no plans for Christmas décor, but will definitely work on a post if I do get some things soon!

Did you decorate your house/apartment/bedroom for autumn? What was your favorite item? And what was your most frustrating piece to put together?

snowflake

DIY: Hallow-Sicles!

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Today I am back with my second DIY post for this month! If you haven’t seen last week’s post, it was called “Candy Corn Banner” and you can check out the instructions on how to make your own banner!

This craft, we got started on it the same day we did the banner. Despite the fact that we were both losing energy, we were both positive and very creative that we thought we’d end up finishing both projects in one day! I still think it was accomplishment that we were able to get the first steps completed and the day I came back to her house we finished the rest of it and made a few more characters!

Again, I found this one on Pinterest but unlike the banner where it was just one link, people make crafts with Popsicle sticks all the time so there’s a mass quantities of them all over the site! However, I will include the one that gave me the idea to help you out, but everything was really simple!

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What you will need for this:

  • Popsicle sticks
  • Paint
  • Glue
  • Paintbrushes
  • Paper Plates
  • Napkins

Most that we used for these guys my nana already had in her “craft drawer” and yes, she has one of those and it’s glorious! Anyways, in the original link they used only five sticks for the characters but I honestly can’t create a whole face in that amount of room so we upped the number to eleven sticks. We lined the sticks side-by-side to make a little fence.

After we figured that out and counted multiple times to make sure we had the right amount of sticks we got started on getting them to stay together. We used a glittery Elmer’s glue that kept drying up on us everytime we tried to use it. My poor nana had so much trouble that she ended up having to take off the cap and actually paint on the glue on the sticks! Surprisingly, that worked a lot better than we thought it would!

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We ended up stopping on the project to finish the banner, so I can’t exactly tell you how long it took for it to dry completely, but it wasn’t that long! I want to say less than five minutes!

I wanted to really give myself room to be creative considering my nana was the one who had to do the beginning steps. So I decided to draw out the characters on a pieces of paper, I made a vampire, Frankenstein, witch, ghost, etc. I just wanted an outline of what I wanted on these canvases. I had my nana measure out the fences and they came out to be 4×1/2 by 4×1/2 and then I had my dad take those measurements and make me four squares on my ole sketch pad.

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When I went to actually draw anything, everything literally went to hell. I am an artist, but I’ve sort of been in retirement for the last 4 or 5 years and apparently parts of me like the status and when I started to draw out a witch, I basically tore myself down.. It was awful! Anyways, I had to find a new way to go about this so I treated it like I was coloring as that doesn’t bother me as much! And I started coloring a witch, and somehow I made what looks like a cross between a warlock and a Frankenstein monster!

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The next day I went back to my nana’s and added another DIY “experiment” to this project! I went on Pinterest to find a way to make homemade paints and I found one, but I will not deny, it is a pain in the butt because you only get the recipe. There’s nothing about getting the lumps out or how long to let it rest. So that part became the actual “experiment” but it was sort of a success! The day after my dad bought us some new paints so we no longer had to use the homemade paint, which is the reason why I’m not including the recipe in this post!

To finish our pumpkins, we didn’t necessarily know what would be easier for us to do as far as the faces went, so she drew out the eyes and nose on hers but I had to figure out a mouth and I went with the standard buck teeth; she did pretty good with this and I ended up doing the same thing but did my eyes differently. She also wanted to add “hair” onto her pumpkin. She originally was going to glue orange yarn, but we both thought it was too much orange so she used a last bit of black glitter for the hair and now he’s very cute!

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I decided to do two more, well at least get started on two others. After I finished my Jack O’ Lantern, that I’ve named “Jackie” I moved on to my next character! I still wanted to try for a witch so I painted a fence in a limeade green and while I let it dry I painted another fence white. For this fence, I decided to go freehand or in this case, “freefoot” and didn’t make an outline of the face. I made the mouth first and then worked my way up! It looked so cute, I was very proud of myself by the end of it!

I let it dry before I moved onto the next stage, which was doing the iris of the eyes. After that, I realized that I didn’t have enough room for the cap and I made a last minute decision to make it a Frankenstein monster, so I made a small hairline and luckily I had the ends of the sticks on the back showing so I painted those areas in black and lastly I added a lavender pupil so he still looked silly, unlike the scary monster I had pictured into my mind! His name is “Frankie” if you wanted to know!

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We officially finished the craft the next day, but I felt if I added any more onto this post, nobody would want to read it. So that’s why I’ve decided to stop here! If you would like to see any others, go check out my Facebook page! I posted some sneak peeks!

Hope you all have enjoyed these posts! 🙂

What do you think of our fence characters? Who is your favorite?

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snowflake

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Almost October

It is almost October. I think one more week until the month of cute costumes, yummy candy, and the one thing I can’t stand. Scary movie previews everywhere on TV. Lovely! The first two I can deal with but the last one I hate with a passion. When I was on Google looking for a picture. I had this one thought I had to pick the cutest picture, this was the winner! She’s so adorable!

I dressed up last year and so did my sister too. Mom was generous enough to let us get costumes for Halloween. What was confusing though was that Halloween for us wasn’t celebrated on the actual day. It was celebrated the weekend before. It actually sucked since I wanted to eat candy on my birthday. Which is probably the reason why my birthday sucked anyway.

I doubt I’ll be out and about this year. Even though it was fun but a little Miss somebody wanted to ruin our fun because she didn’t like her costume, even though we all thought it was cute. She was dressed up as a witch, she was definitely a bitch that night. I don’t see myself dressing up this year especially since Halloween is on a Monday. Which people will change it to the weekend before. No scense in it this year.