Autumn Decor

Fall is in the air…isn’t that exciting? Around here, that means that we are no longer having triple digit temperatures. Woo hoo! With daytime highs of less than 85 degrees and night time lows in the 50’s, I’m in the mood for everything Autumn. The other day I got the hankering to just make something new to add to my Fall decorating. I gave myself a challenge. Do you ever do that? My challenge was that I would use materials that I already own and create something I’ve never seen before. Here is what I decided to work with:

Some stained old textured wallpaper and 3 scrap pieces of 2×4 left over from a garage shelving project. Are you inspired? I was. Wanna see what I made?

Turned out okay, don’t you think? I happen to love it! Would you like to see how I made it? Alright. Here we go:

First step, I cut out the textured wallpaper. I wanted a continuous pattern so I traced around the 2×4’s, stacked vertically, on the back side of the wallpaper. After cutting out the wallpaper, I glued a strip down on each of the 2×4’s using regular white glue. Easy. To make sure that it didn’t bubble, I stacked them up and weighed them down with books. As the glue dried I made up a pattern. Kind of. I’m not an artist so I went to the computer and found a basic pumpkin template. I printed it out then cut the image in 4 pieces so I could stretch it out to make a larger size. After taping it down to a large sheet of (pieced together) paper, I drew in my own lines. Next step, I cut out the paper template and then transferred the pumpkin shape to my textured wallpaper 2×4’s, again making sure that the pattern was continuous.

After cutting the individual pieces out, I sanded random dents in the edges to make them more rounded and textured. See?

I wanted the pumpkins to look nice and finished and not thrown together so I made sure to “caulk” the edges with spackling.

See how much better the spackled part looks?

I chose to paint my pumpkin a nice white, but orange, black, aqua or teal would be equally nice. I had originally painted mine black with the intention of sanding the edges to allow the black to show through, but ended up liking the white, un-distressed look.

My stalk is a cut piece of a branch from a tree in my yard. If wishes were fishes, I would have made it longer, but by the time that I decided that, the darn thing was too attached to remove.