Sweater Pumpkins for Fall Decorating

Way back in 2011 when we first moved in, I was very excited about decorating our new house for each and every occasion! When Fall came, I wanted to make sweater pumpkins, so I did. I realized recently that I had never shared them here on the blog, so here goes!

I think these are so whimsical and fun.  I used my honey's old unwanted sweaters to create these, but you could certainly shop Goodwill or your local thrift store to find some sweaters too.

I also went into my stash of vintage doilies, lace and buttons and added those too for a bit of a vintage look, which I love!

To make these no sew sweater pumpkins:

Starting at the cuff of the sleeve, measure up to the length you want.  The length will vary depending on the size of pumpkin you're going for.

Turn the sleeve wrong side out.  Cut four pieces of jute to a length just about 6 inches longer than your sleeve.  Place all four pieces of jute inside the cut end of the sleeve with the excess length hanging out the cuff end.  At the cut edge of the sleeve with the jute even to the end, tie the end with a small piece of jute twine very tightly.

Turn the sleeve right side out again.  Your four pieces of jute should be hanging out of the bottom end of your pumpkin now.

Stuff your pumpkin with poly fill to the size you want.

Now to make the ridges of your pumpkin.  Pull each piece of twine up to the stem area.  Do the same with each of the four pieces.  Adjust to the look you want and tie it all together with another piece of twine.  You can wrap more twine around the top if you'd like or leave it a little more of the sweater flared out.  I did it both ways as you can see below.

Now add your doilies, lace and buttons with a bit of hot glue and you're done!

There is no exact way they should look when you're finished, just make sure you like how they look and you're good!

Have you made sweater pumpkins before? How'd you make yours?

Want to see more of my Fall Decorating? Look HERE.

It doesn't have to be done all at once.  It is a slow process in the works! C-ya next time!

I'm Linking to:
These lovely and FUN parties!
Between Naps on the Porch
The Dedicated House  - (I was featured)

Chevron Burlap Fall Wreath

I love burlap and chevron so when I saw this burlap ribbon, I "needed" it!  I've had it for a while, but used very little of it on the last project it was used on, which you can see here.

This wreath has had a few different looks so far, but I'm finally happy with how it looks now. 

All the little floral picks, pumpkins, leaves and pine cones that you see on the left of the wreath came from Dollar General.  They added up to about $5.

I bought the straw wreath form at Goodwill several years ago for $2.  I added the orange tulle to it using the "push into the straw" method.  I was planning on making a jack-o-lantern face with it, but didn't care for how the tulle application turned out.  It then sat in my holiday decor closet for another few years until this year when I spotted it way in the back.  I pulled it out.

I grabbed my floral goodies that I got at the dollar store and hot glued them to the sad looking wreath.  NOPE! I still didn't like it.....at all!

One week later, I decided to try and salvage this big ole wreath and make it look pretty again.  So, I pulled almost all of the tulle out of the wreath form.  I only left a small amount of it on either side of the floral grouping.

Off to my decor closet I went because I knew I had this burlap ribbon in there somewhere.  Its pretty wide, so I rolled a bit out (I counted out four rows of chevron) and cut a piece off.  I folded that in half and cut it again.  I then folded those pieces in half again and cut those.  The smallest pieces is what I used to finish out my wreath.

I used my crochet hook to push the burlap into the wreath form.  You could also use a phillips screwdriver as well, I've done that before too.  I just found center of my ribbon piece and pushed it into the wreath form until I liked how it looked.

Push down firmly until you like how each piece looks.  If you don't like it, pull it out and try again.  This method is very forgiving.  I kept adding little pieces until I reached the other side.  You can hot glue the pieces on if you feel you need to, but mine stayed in there really well.

Now I like the wreath a lot!  I don't know what it was about the tulle, but it just didn't suit my fancy! lol!  I guess I'm a burlap kinda girl instead of a tulle kind of girl. :)

These little florals are pretty cute for dollar store goodies, that's why I grabbed them up when I saw them.  Stuff goes fast at our dollar store so if you don't grab it when you first see it, it wont be there when you go back.

I really made this to hang on my front door, but its so huge that the door won't shut all the way, so now its hanging in the living room and I love looking at it.

Do you make a new wreath for every season or holiday?  If so, what's your favorite kind to make?

Want to see more of my wreaths?  Click HERE.

Want to see what we've been up to recently at The Clover House?
Porcelain Wood Look Tile Floor
Builder Grade Door Makeover
DIY Perfect Baseboards
DIY Barn Wood Light Fixture

It doesn't have to be done all at once.  It is a slow process in the works! C-ya next time!

I'm Linking to:
These lovely and FUN parties!
Between Naps on the Porch
The Dedicated House  - (I was featured)

Easy to Make Fancy Hand Lettered Sign

If you've ever wanted one of those cute wooden signs you've seen all over the internet,  here's an easy way to make your very own.  You can be fancy too!

I ended up framing mine with a very simple frame, but the sign would be cute without the frame as well.

To recreate my sign, you will need:
A piece of wood cut to the size of sign you are wanting.  (Mine is 13 1/4" x 5 3/4")
Bromello font - download it for free HERE.
Paint of your choice and black for the lettering
Foam paint brush
Fine/small paint brush
Pencil
Optional for the Frame:
1 x 2 wood
Wood Stain of your choice
Chop saw
Nail Gun

For my size sign, I used the Bromello font and printed it at 288 points using my home printer.  It did not fit all on one page, so I pieced it together using some scotch tape.

I used an acrylic paint for my base coat and a chalk paint for the top coat.  I don't suppose it matters what type of paint you use, its just what I had on hand, so that's what I used.  By the way, this chalk paint is what I used to color the inside of the drawers of my bedside table.  Check that out HERE.

Using the lighter color paint and a foam brush, I painted a really good covering of paint over the entire top surface of the wood.  Let that dry well.

Next, using the chalk paint, I painted on a light coat so that some of the lighter color would show through.  I wanted two colors because I like to distress my projects, its just a preference, not a must! :)

You can see above how I pieced the printed letters together to make one long word.  With your printed letters flipped to the back side, grab a pencil and heavily color over the printed letters.

WARNING: The printed letters will transfer to whatever they are laying on. Luckily mine was on my hutch top which is porcelain, so it came right off.  You may want to put something down under the letters when doing this step.

After you have the backside covered with pencil, carefully position your letters on your painted board and secure with a small amount of scotch tape to hold it in place.

Using a pencil, trace the outside perimeter of each letter pressing firmly as you go.

Carefully remove the printed letters and you should have traced the word you chose on to your board.  If needed, go back in with your pencil and fill in any spots that didn't transfer well.

The part where I overlapped the paper while piecing it together, didn't do to well, so I just went over it so I could see it better.  Next time, I will try and make the paper piecing a lot less thick and not have so much overlapping itself. Lesson learned!

Now for the fun part, painting the letters.  Use a fine tipped paint brush and black acrylic paint and fill in the traced lines of the word.

The reason I chose the Bromello font is because its edges are not crisp and true, they are shaky and uneven...just like my painting skills! Ha!

You can leave your sign just like this, or you can follow my lead and distress it and add a frame.

To distress my sign, I took it out to the shop and used our mouse sanders with a very fine grit paper and went over top of it and all around the edges so that some of the lighter color paint would show through.

The frame is so easy. Just measure your sign from side to side.  Mine is 13 1/4" so I cut two pieces of 1 x 2 at that length.  Then, lay the sign and your two cut long pieces down and measure top to bottom.  Mine measures 7 1/4" so I cut two pieces of 1 x 2 at that length.  Now, stain or paint your frame if you'd like.  Lastly, using the nail gun, I asked my honey to nail it all together for me because I did not want to ruin my sign after all my hard work! I'm not the best with the nail gun yet. :)

I'm having a giveaway right HERE.  Please check it out!

Want to see what we've been up to recently at The Clover House?
Porcelain Wood Look Tile Floor
Builder Grade Door Makeover
DIY Perfect Baseboards
DIY Barn Wood Light Fixture

It doesn't have to be done all at once.  It is a slow process in the works! C-ya next time!

I'm Linking to:
These lovely and FUN parties!
Between Naps on the Porch
The Dedicated House  - (I was featured)

Our Trip to the Pioneer Woman Mercantile

Some may not even know who the Pioneer Woman is, but I got to go visit her Mercantile for my birthday this year!  It was a fun trip for my honey and I.  This little road trip was a much needed get away from our daily rush.

If you want to know who the Pioneer Woman is, check out this post right here where I talk about my Pioneer Woman Collection.

So in case you didn't know, my honey is the best!  He planned the whole weekend out and off we went to Pawhuska Oklahoma.  Its about a five hour drive for us from Texas.

We actually left the night before we planned to visit the Merc and stayed in Tulsa Oklahoma so we wouldn't have to get up so early that day to get to the Merc in time to eat lunch.  I had read about how yummy the food was and we were on a mission to get to eat there too.  When we arrived at a little after 10am, it was already a 2 hour wait.  We decided to skip the lunch line and go on inside to look around.

TIP: If you stay in a hotel/motel/bedandbreakfast near the Merc, mention that you are visiting because we did and we got $10 off each nights stay.  We stayed in Bartlesville, OK.

Everything in there is staged so cute and of course I wanted one of everything! lol!  I restrained myself though.

All of the displays are so farmhouse/country-ish and just my style.  This little bin here is where I got something for one of my lucky readers.  Keep reading to find out how you can WIN!

Displays of so much goodness is at your every turn.  Its truly a visual overload, well, for a person like me with "butterfly syndrome"!  Everything is pretty and I wanted to touch it all!

Look at all the people!  We are standing on the stairs going up to the bakery.  There were even more people when we came back down.

My honey bought me lots of goodies...did I already tell you he's the best?  By the way, ALL of the employees are super sweet and helpful.  The ladies that checked us out were very friendly and were glad to answer our questions.

Here's the bakery.  The sweet ladies at the checkout downstairs told us we could get a bite to eat upstairs in the bakery, so off we went to check it out.

Here's the area where you can get a baked goodie.  EVERYTHING looked so yummy!

I don't know who does their chalk art, but its throughout the Merc and its really awesome!  This is in the candy area of the bakery.  So cute!

Our baked goodies. We got a giant chocolate chip with sea  salt cookie, a cream cheese pastry and a lemon marmalade muffin.

We also got a sandwich lunch special to share along with a lemonade and a sweet tea all to go!  Now we were off to the Lodge out on the Drummond Farm.  When you visit the Merc, if it happens to be a day that you can visit the Lodge, they will give you a piece of paper with the driving directions on it.  The Lodge is only open on certain days when Ree is not filming the cooking show out there.

On that piece of paper it tells you will see wild horses, and you do!  This is only a few that we saw.  There were literally hundreds of them just grazing out in the pasture.  Such a beautiful sight to see.  There were cows too of course.

We're here! This is the Lodge.  The farm is huge and oh so gorgeous.  We enjoyed the short drive out there from the Merc.  The directions were perfect!

This is down below the parking area of the Lodge.  It was a gorgeous day that day and I'm pretty sure I could have just stood here for ever taking it all in. Gorgeous!

My honey and I shared our lunch and then went in to see what we could see.  We had a HUGE turkey bacon sammie with pasta salad and grapes. YUM!

Guess who "greeted" us at the door? Walter!  He was deep asleep and couldn't even be bothered with all the people sitting down beside him to get a picture! lol!  He was inside in the a/c enjoying himself.

This is the big pantry right behind the kitchen area where Ree films.  Full to the brim with everything you might need.

Her Pioneer Woman Collection was sprinkled everywhere throughout the Lodge.  I'm pretty sure Ree has the ultimate collection.  None of us fans has ANYTHING on her!

This huge fireplace was to the left of the kitchen area.  I loved all of their boots on the mantel as decor.  Great idea!  So cute!

Here's where all the magic happens, well most of it I guess.  Everyone there wanted a picture in the kitchen.

Including me!  My honey snapped a picture of me quickly so the next person could have a turn.  Wouldn't it be fun to cook a meal with Ree?

We wondered around the Lodge for a while just looking at all the big bedrooms and the pretty decor.  We then discovered all the way in the back of the Lodge another kitchen area with another giant storage room full of Pioneer Woman dishes and such. Everything you'd need to stage a meal beautifully.  We enjoyed the visit and then we were off on down the road to our next adventure.  We saw more wild horses on the way out.  They were in no way concerned with all the traffic going by them.  I guess they are already used to it now.  Also, see all the wind turbines in the background, those are another familiar site in our area of the world. Those things always amaze me!

If you ever get the chance and its something you'd like to do, go visit the Mercantile and the Lodge if you can.  I enjoyed the visit and I bet you would too!

HOW TO WIN: 
I'm giving away one set of (8) Vintage Stripe cloth napkins to one luck winner.
All you have to do is follow our blog and leave a comment here telling me what your favorite Pioneer Woman Collection piece is.  I will choose and announce a winner on September 17th.  

***Please make sure you are a NOT a no-reply blogger so I can get in touch with you if you win.***  Good luck! 

The WINNER is:

My winner is Monkey! YAY! Congratulations Monkey, please email me your mailing address so I can get your prize shipped out to you!

Want to see what we've been up to recently at The Clover House?
Porcelain Wood Look Tile Floor
Builder Grade Door Makeover
DIY Perfect Baseboards
DIY Barn Wood Light Fixture

It doesn't have to be done all at once.  It is a slow process in the works! C-ya next time!

I'm Linking to:
These lovely and FUN parties!
Between Naps on the Porch
The Dedicated House  - (I was featured)