Happy Fall Ya'll

This fall has been a journey in healing. There is nothing that prepares you for the hardships that we have had to endure as a couple this year, but I think going through this has helped us to grow closer together, closer to God, and to appreciate everything just a little bit more.

Part of my process to healing was to talk. Talk about what happened with my husband and my family and my friends. The rest of my process was to return to some sense of normalcy. I continued to coach volleyball. It was hard because there were definitely times when my heart wasn't in it. I continue to teach because this is the area of my life where I can truly make a difference. I can form relationships with my students and help them to be better while I make myself better. There are definitely days when I walk out of my classroom knowing that I didn't do the best job that I could, but it just reminds me that I have to take it easy on myself. I am still healing and not every day is going to be perfect. I continued to work on my masters degree. My goal in life is to give my future children everything I had growing up and more. I want them to live in a house, with a dog, and have everything that I could possibly give them, and pursuing my masters degree makes me better and more valuable, which will make things better for them in the long run. It's been difficult, stressful, and has caused me a lot of anxiety, but all of the challenges will be worth it when I walk across the stage in May officially a Michigan State University Alum. The last thing that I have continued to do as a stress relief and a method of healing is to craft.

My home is one of the most important things to me and when I am given a spark of creativity, I have to run with it. The following projects that I am about to share were completed with my mother-in-law while she tried to keep me positive and help me heal. Fall is my favorite season of the year. It is the time where we are reminded to give thanks. To appreciate what we have and what we have experienced and thank God for all that is coming in the future. When September hits, my home turns into a fall haven of reds, yellows, oranges, and browns, and I spent a lot of time on Pinterest pooling ideas and thinking about ways that I could make them my own. My mother-in-law and I spent a whole afternoon crafting earlier this fall. We made two different kinds of wood pumpkins and then a stacked pumpkin address stand for the front step. In the rest of the post that follows, I will give you details about the supplies you will need and how we completed these projects for our homes.

1. 2 x 4 Pumpkins

This project was almost an afterthought as we were walking through the hardware store getting a 2x6 and some spray paint for a couple of my other ideas. As a shameless Pinterest addict, this is a straight from Pinterest special. This is the post that I originally saved and they include a supply list for what they used. I will preface with the fact that I am not super into the new - old look type of thing and while I think weathered wood looks pretty, it's just not my style. With anything that I do on pinterest, I tend to make a little my own.

Supplies

• 2 X 4 X 8 - I bought mine at Lowe's for less than $5. The original post used scraps that she had her house. I bought new.
• Saw - My husband the DIYer for our home of course has a table saw that I used to cut the wood pieces. If you are truly using scraps, obviously they don't have to be perfect.
• Sandpaper - You don't have to, but I recommend sanding the wood down for a cleaner finish. My husband has a Ryobi sander from Home Depot, so that came in handy.
• Hot glue gun & glue sticks. Those are pretty much a staple of any craft project.
• Paint. I used acrylic paint called Pumpkin Spice and then just regular brown for our stumps.
• Ribbon - The ribbon that will is pictured in our final products was something that my mother-in-law had in her crafting stuff. Any ribbon that you like will work :)
• Fake leaves - again, not necessary, but definitely something that we liked. We also had these laying around from a previous project.

 I am the one that purchased the 2 X 4 from Lowe's and cut it down to size. I followed the measurements laid out in the blog post above for two 6" and two 8" pieces. My husband screwed the pieces together before we started painting. The stem pieces were made with the scrap wood left over from the piece of wood and cut down smaller. Then we painted. I just used regular acrylic paint from the craft store. The particular color of the orange was Pumpkin Spice. It's a little darker, but still pretty orange. We painted the stems brown. My MIL is pretty gifted with ribbon bows, so she tied those for the both of us. And then we used a hot glue gun to add the leaves to the stems. They are fall colored, but you could use any that you like. To the left is our finished product. Mine is sitting proudly on an end table in my living room.


     2. Three 2 X 6 Pumpkins

 Our second project together was actually the one that started the whole premise of the crafting day. I saw these pumpkins at a craft show and then upon some perusing on Pinterest once again, I found them again, and they looked fairly simple. Just like the pumpkins we made above, these were again made out of scrap pieces of wood, some paint, and then a little something here or there for embellishments. A majority of the posts that I had seen on these pumpkins were from Etsy where you could buy them already made, but so very often I think to myself, "I could make those cheaper than I could buy them from this person," so I made them myself.

Supplies

• One 2 X 6 X 8 - I bought mine from Lowe's again.
• Saw and Sander - again, love that my husband is a DIY guy because we have these in our garage.
• Acrylic Paint - we used Pumpkin Spice Orange, a brighter neon looking orange, rose gold, silver, and then brown and green for the stems (the stems are not done yet)
• Hot glue gun - again, a staple
• Painter's tape - how else would we make those straight lines and that fancy chevron look
• A ruler - what perfectionist doesn't love straight lines on her work?
• Miscellaneous embellishments to finish it off

So this project is one that is not quite complete yet. We each got the first two pumpkins of our three completed, and then just ran out of time before dinner and they had to head home. I got the project started for us by getting the 2 X 6 from Lowe's. I cut ours into 8", 10", and 14" pieces. We wanted one of them to look short like a pumpking and then the other two to be taller. I then used smaller pieces to make the stems as I did with the previous pumpkins. I sanded them down to a nice smooth surface, but did not have my husband attach the stems. We learned from the other pumpkins that painting them while they were attached was difficult and touching up was a pain in the butt. Sanding just gave them a nice smooth surface and cleaned up the rough edges from cutting them with the saw.




My mother-in-law decided that she wanted her pumpkins to be silver and orange because a lot of the accents in her house are silver or brushed nickel. We have a lot of warm tones in our house, so I went with rose gold and the pumpkin spice orange. We started off by painting each of our pumpkins the base color. I did the rose gold, and she did silver. We decided that it was easier to paint the orange over the top. My pumpkins were going to have vertical stripes, horizontal stripes, and then a chevron pattern. She did vertical, chevron and polka dots for hers. The only one of each of ours that is not complete is the chevron. They are the hardest to accomplish perfectly when using painter's tape and we ran out of time. I used a ruler to measure the different increments where we would put the painter's tape, and then I also used the ruler to keep my lines straight. My mother-in-law used different sized bottle caps to make her circles before she carefully painted them in.

Like I said before, these are not a finished product, but I will make sure to add more to this portion when they are completed. Which is hopefully soon!

     3. Address Pumpkins

My final project, also a Pinterest inspiration, was to make something for my front porch that was super cute and fall themed. Again, my mother-in-law was in on this action. It is a craft where I merged two different ideas together to form what I came up with.

The photo on the left is what inspired the fact that I wanted the address on the pumpkins that I put together, and the photo on the right is where I drew the rest of my inspiration. Below is the supply list of the things I got for this project...

• Four trick or treat pumpkins (or however many you need for your project) - I got mine from Wal-Mart for $1 each
• Bronze spray paint - I got mine from Lowe's for $6. You can obviously get whatever color you would like.
• Flowers/Embellishments - I got mine as a bouquet from Hobby Lobby when they had all of their fall floral on sale. It is obviously up to whatever you want.
• Vinyl - I had some leftover from my Cricut starter pack. I used tan for mine and silver for my mother-in-law. Again, use whatever color you deem necessary.
• Cricut - to cut out the vinyl, I used my Cricut.
• Hot glue gun/glue - to put the pumpkins together
• Pea gravel/sand - I used pea gravel as a weight to weigh down the bottom pumpkin to keep it from falling over.
• Mod-Podge - to seal the vinyl on the pumpkins
• Florist foam block - got mine from Joann

My husband, the wonderfully supportive man that he is, spray painted all 8 pumpkins for me once I took all the handles off. One side of the pumpkin has the jack-o-lantern face on it, so we just faced those the other way. I bought a florist foam block from Joann to hold the flowers in place for the top. The bouquet that I bought had a variety of fall flowers in various colors - purples, maroons, golds, oranges, reds, etc.  I had to cut the block down because it was a little too big, but was able to use one block for both of our top pumpkins. We did address numbers, so the next thing was to load up the laptop and get the Cricut ready to go. I still have to seal the numbers and glue the pumpkins together before I can put it outside. It may be one that gets saved for next year since it's nearly time for the Christmas decorations to be out!

The top picture here is the almost finished product. The bottom picture is the flowers that I arranged for the top pumpkin.















Until next time...