It's Fall Y'all

I interrupt my trek into the past to bring you all some current looks into our abode. A few weeks back, I put up our fall decorations. Each year, I tend to stick with a lot of our previous pieces while adding in a few new touches. Last year, I did a lot of green and blue pumpkins, squash, gourds, etc. and loved how they blended so easily with our normal, year-round decor. I created a vignette on our dining room buffet last year, and loved it so much, I recreated it again this year!

And I used another one of my painted gourds (from a pack from the Dollar Store that I just used acrylic paint on!) in a little display in our living room.

But on our mantle this year, I was eager for a couple more natural touches. 

I love the wheat stalks, but I am absolutely obsessed with my cotton wreath. I have loved them from afar (read:Pinterest) for awhile, but always got discouraged because when I would click on links to DIY them, it would cite getting cotton from real fields. Well, there's no cotton field anywhere near me (yes, I even googled to find out...I was that desperate to find some branches!). So after striking out, I was completely thrilled to find faux bols at Michaels!!!! I bought their entire supply, figuring I'd use them to make a wreath and save the rest to incorporate into our Thanksgiving table. Making the wreath was a breeze too, once I just stuck with my glue gun! At first, I was trying to use wire to tie each bol (cut off the branches with wire cutters) to the grapevine wreath, but it was time-consuming and frustrating trying to tie each one securely. So I whipped out the glue gun and finished the whole thing in about 10 minutes!

The process was so quick I actually made another wreath too. Going with that natural look still, I decided to make a leaf wreath with some leaves I purchased from Hobby Lobby. I played with the idea of just leaving them natural looking, but ultimately chose to spray paint them in metallic tones...ORB, gold, and rose gold. Once they dried, I just layered them around a foam form and voila...

As I've done for the past few years, I picked up some mums for out front, so now our front entrance looks especially festive.

Especially because our scarecrow, Freddy Johnny (named by the boys) is out there too! We made him a couple of weeks ago at an event to benefit our local childrens' hospital, and the boys are very proud of him although I really think the rain did a number on him the last couple of weeks. You probably can't tell in the picture, but he's struggling a bit!