Farmhouse Fall Decor {Part 2}

 So...I finished up a project this week that I am SO excited to share with you!  I can hardly wait, but wait I must because it was a Christmas project and I never did finish showing you my fall decor in the dining room and kitchen so I feel I need to do that first.  

On the table I have a set of place mats that I thrifted years ago.  We alternate between these and a pretty fall tablecloth that I also thrifted.  When the 4 year old spills something (and he always does) then we switch them out.  I also have a cute little leaf S&P shaker set given to me by a friend a few years ago, along with a fall themed silverware caddy.  Though we're using it to hold napkins and seasonings that Hubs likes left on the table.

Behind the table in the buffet area I hung my fall picture I love so much.  Of course,  I love old red trucks for sure, but it's also really special because it belonged to my grandparents before they passed away and the truck has the name of the town where they lived on it.

The plaid runner was thrifted a couple of years ago.  It was actually just a strip of fabric that I turned into a valance to use in our 2nd bathroom at our last house.  In this house I don't have any place to use it as a valance so I simply folded it in half and used it as a runner.  I added the Rub-N-Buff made over candleholders set and some pillar candles with a bit of moss around them.  I really wanted to find pretty fall candles to put in these, but I couldn't find just the right ones like I had in mind.  I already had these ivory colored ones so I ended up using those instead and just added a bit of twine and an old key to make them a little more interesting and a little less "vanilla."  : )

Here's a reminder of what these candleholders looked like before.

A bit of silver Rub-N-Buff and then some Spanish Copper over top of that gave them a perfectly aged looking patina.  A 5 minute project with wonderful results.

My $1 rusty rooster makes his appearance again.  I love this little guy!  

Some faux bittersweet tucked in around it finishes it off.

I tucked in a berry vine around my Mason jars that are lined up in the big dining room window.

Above the kitchen cupboards I added a few touches of fall as well.

This end has a Pilgrim couple that my mom gave me and one little faux gourd.

In the middles hangs a vintage looking sign that I got several years ago, probably from Home Goods.

On this end, I took away the little stack of towels on the scale and added a small faux pumpkin, and I replaced the bright red geraniums with a fall colored bouquet.

The cookie bucket belonged to my granny back in the day and my mom just gave it to me recently.

Beside the sink I have this little touch of autumn.

It's a vintage potato masher.  

I added a small berry vine around it and tucked in a tiny little jar candle. 

Above the sink in the window I have this little arrangement.  I took the picture in the dark because it looked so cozy with the candle lit.

I keep this little feeder jar that my sister found at a thrift store on the counter within easy reach.  We added some candy corn to it for fall, and then for Christmas we'll change it out to some green and red M&M's.  Ain't it so cute?!?

And then I just had to show you our painted pumpkins from this year.  In my last post I shared a picture of our pumpkins from last year, but I never did show you this year's.  My daughter decided she wanted to make hers a minion this time around.  Well, when my son heard that he decided he wanted his to be Gru.  So, then we decided well if we have two Despicable Me pumpkins then we might as well go ahead and do all of them as characters from those movies.  So here's what we came up with.

This yellow minion pumpkin is my daughter's.  I drew in the parts for her and she did all the painting.  We glued on canning jar lids as his goggles.

Here's Gru, done by my 4 year old.  He painted the whole thing pinkish, I drew in his main parts and he painted them, and then I finished off a few of the details of the eyes for him.  I molded his nose out of Play-Dough and we attached it with a skewer.  A thrifted scarf finished him off.

The kids decided that mine should be a purple minion.  I found this fuzzy purple hat at a thrift store for $1.  I tucked the brim under and it made for the perfect crazy purple hair for it.

We all decided that Hub's had to be an El Macho pumpkin since Hubs has a big mustache, too.  :D  It ended up that he was too busy to paint his pumpkin this time around so I did it for him.  I thought it turned out pretty cute.  :)

 This last picture has nothing to do with decor, but I wanted to share one more thing with you.  We hosted a fall festival on Halloween night at our house for our church's youth group and one of the things I did was to make this Pumpkin Puke chip dip.

It was just spinach dip, and I wasn't sure how the kids would react to it but they loved it and thought it was the coolest thing ever and gobbled it right up to the last scrapings.  Brave bunch.  :)

That's it for my fall posts for this year.  Later today I'm off for my weekend trip to Mt. Dora, FL for the Renninger's Antique and Flea Market Extravaganza.  I am SO very excited to be going again!  I went about 5 years ago with Hubby for my birthday, and it was 8 solid hours of walking to booth after booth after booth and we didn't even get to them all!  This year I'm going with my mother-in-law, just us girls, no men, no kids, for 2.5 days.  It's in celebration of both of our birthdays this month and it's gonna be some serious junkin' fun!!!  

And when I get back from that.....the Christmas decor is coming out!  I am so excited for Christmas this year for some reason.  I just love love love it and it never lasts long enough for me.  So this year I'm breaking my rule of waiting until after Thanksgiving to decorate and we're gonna get our jingle on a couple of weeks early.  I can't wait!!

How about you?  Are you already decorating for Christmas?   Or are you a die hard for waiting until Thanksgiving is over?  Has anybody else ever been to the Mt. Dora Extravaganza?

I'd love to hear from you!

                                                                 

How to Get the Most Out of Your Fall Pumpkins

This week I've been helping my kiddos paint their pumpkins.  It's a yearly tradition that we do instead of carving them, partly because we don't really celebrate Halloween so carving them into scary faces is kind of pointless.  We like to do happier and more creative things with them.  But also because the pumpkins last a whole lot longer this way.  Once they're carved they start rotting and only last a few days and that seems like a waste of money to me.  Keeping them whole makes them last quite a long time.

So, I got to thinking about what we did with ours last year and how I got my money's worth out of them and I decided some of you might like these ideas, too.

So here's what we did last year.

Sometime in October we have a family night and we break out the paints and brushes and go to town creating faces (or in the case of the 3 year old's pumpkin, lots of random colors mixed everywhere).  : ) The kids loved my Mike Wyzowski pumpkin and that inspired them to want to do a whole set of Despicable Me characters this year.

Three out of the 4 pumpkins were still good by Thanksgiving time in November so I spray painted one of them white and we toted it along on our trip to visit family.

I took a permanent marker and set it up in my mom's living room and it became our "thankful pumpkin."  Throughout the day everyone wrote something they were thankful for and signed their name.  It was really fun to turn it around and around and read what everyone added.  I made sure to take a picture of each side to help us remember.

By December we were down to 2 pumpkins that were still good so I let the kids paint them again and this time they turned them into "snowmen."

The 3 year old's looked a little more like a melting snowman, lol!  : )

If we had enough pumpkins that were still good we may have tried this stacked snowman from Sweet Pepper Rose.  Isn't he adorable?

Here's another cute Christmas pumpkin idea from Club Chica Circle that I like. 

 (They also have a cute idea in that same post about using "snow" paint to do a snowman pumpkin.  We might try that one this year.)

You could even do the ornaments first for December and if your pumpkins are still going strong you could do the snowmen for January.  

So there ya have it.  Just a quick post to give you some ideas on how to get the most out of your fall pumpkins.  Not only are you getting your money's worth out of them, but it makes the fun last that much longer, too.  

Do you guys have any additional creative ideas on how to repurpose your fall pumpkins?  

I'd love to hear about it!

                                                               

Farmhouse Fall Decor

Well, I figured it was about time I got around to sharing my fall decor with y'all.  If I don't do it now it'll be time for Christmas decor before I ever get it around to it.  

I didn't spend nearly as much time on it this year as I normally do.  Usually my method is to open up my tubs of decor and spread it all around to see what I have and then I work on it bit by bit over the course of an entire week trying to get it just right.  But this year was different.  For starters I now only have one tub of stuff versus the three I used to have.  Before we moved from Ohio I did a major purge and consolidated it down to only one large Rubbermaid tub.  So I didn't have as much to work with, but also I just didn't feel like agonizing over it for a whole week.  I pretty well just reused some of the same ideas I've done in the past, just changing them slightly, and didn't bother with a whole lot of second guessing myself and I had it done in 2 days.  Like it or lump it, but it's finished.  : )

Another Sharpie Mug Project

I just wanted to pop in and share a quick post of something I've been up to this week.

If you've been around my blog for awhile then you might remember the BFF Sharpie mug project I did last year for my friend in Ohio. 

That tutorial post became quite popular and it's still my top viewed post every week with well over 100,000 views total.  

But that was the only one I had ever made....until this week. 

 One of the teen girls at church had a birthday this week and I wanted to do something special for her without having to spend money we didn't really have.  Then it dawned on me I had some plain white Corelle mugs I had bought at the thrift store for .25 each just waiting for such an occasion.  I used the same technique as I did with the last one, printing out the design, shading the back, and then tracing it onto the mug (more detailed directions here).  Then I painted over the design with an oil based Sharpie paint pen.  Once the black paint was dry I came back and used white paint to do the polka dots.  It looked kind of gray, so once they were dry I put a second coat of white on them.  Then I baked it at 425 just like I did the last time.

Fun Friday Finds #26

Welcome back to Fun Friday Finds!!

A friend from church and I went yard sale-ing yesterday so I have some fun finds to share with you.  We didn't find very many sales, they're kind of sporadic on Fridays around here anyways, but it had also been rainy all week so I think that may have scared a lot of people off.  We drove through three different towns in our search.  One place was like going 'round Robin Hood's barn trying to find it as the arrows on the signs pointed in opposite directions.  Then once we finally found it, after following some other randomly placed arrows, we had to be careful where we stepped so as not to fall through the floor of the poor 'ol trailer.  I think the bike they had that my friend wanted (that was NOT for sale) was nicer than the entire home and its contents combined.  Yikes!

We finally saw another sign in the 3rd town and I almost didn't even go to it because the sign was in a not so nice part of town.  But my friend convinced me to forge on ahead because it said the sale was 4 miles down the road and she said there were nicer homes further on down.  So on we went.  And boy am I glad we did!!  It was the vintage jackpot!  And they were making some serious deals.  I probably could have bought and resold everything they had if I had been so inclined.  Well, all except for the vintage Playboy magazines that is.

I got these license plates for $1 each, one even still has an old reverse light still attached!  I've been wanting a few more to put in my son's room, but they're usually around $10 each most places I've seen them.

Construction Themed 4th Birthday Party

This past weekend was my son's 4th birthday party.  We alternate each year on which child gets the big party and this year was his turn.  I'm all about doing up cute parties, but within reason.  They still have to fit into our one income budget.  Thankfully, I had a few Etsy sales beforehand so I had a little bit extra to spend.

Months ago I asked him what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday and he and I perused Pinterest for ideas and when he saw this one from Fredillicious that was it, that was the one he wanted!  He had that exact same backhoe already so this was "his" cake!

(source)

So that's how we came up with our construction theme. 

We found this cute set of plates at Hobby Lobby and that's what I based everything around.

100 Sales Giveaway!

** The winner is......PJ Harrison!!  Thank you so much to all of you who entered the giveaway, it made it so much fun for me.  And congratulations to Pamela!  I've sent out an email to you so if you could get back to me with your address right away I can get your vintage prize pack sent out this week. **

So I've been promising a giveaway to celebrate when I reached 100 sales in my Etsy shop.  100 sales came (woot woot!!)....and went... and I kept promising, but life got busy and I just couldn't manage to fit it all in.  But never fear, I got it together and it's finally giveaway time once again!

Up for grabs is a vintage prize pack that includes: 1 cute little jelly jar & lid, 10 vintage wooden clothespins, and a vintage tea towel with sweet red stitching around the edges.

The giveaway will start at midnight tonight and end on Sunday the 14th.  Just leave me a comment on this post telling me how you would incorporate these items into your decor if you were to win.  And that's it!  I kept it simple, there's only one way to enter. Make sure you go back and click on the Rafflecopter widget where it says "I commented!" so that you'll be entered.  Also, be sure to leave me an email address so that I can contact you should you win.  A winner will be announced on Monday morning, September 15th.

Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway