Chevron and Orange Halloween Wreath

Good mooooorning, all!

I thought I'd cheer up your Monday morning with another pretty fun wreath I made for Halloween. Well, I guess technically it's for Fall. But to me it definitely has some Halloween tones to it (orange, much?)

I always have an inner struggle with Fall/Halloween decorations. When is it okay to start decorating for Fall? When is it okay to start decorating for Halloween? My sister and I were lamenting over the fact that a.) She doesn't have any Fall decorations, just Halloween decorations and b.) I don't have any Halloween decorations, just Fall decorations. What a conundrum, I tell you.

Anyway, as much as I enjoy Halloween, I usually only put out a few jack-o-lanterns or a few distinctively "Halloween" decorations. Maybe when Peyton is a little older I'll add some more to the Halloween line-up, but right now it's just too easy to put my decorations up in September and then just switch out a few items until it's time to bust out the Christmas decorations on Black Friday.

So, I made this wereath and I like it because to me, it says Halloween, but really it can be left up throughout the Fall. Holla back, versatile wreathy goodness!

The last wreath I shared with you was all fancy, but this one is super fun and whimsical thanks to the chevron print and the ruffled flowers I made with some sweet orange satin fabric.

To make this, you'll need your supplies:

Wreath form

Fabric of your choice:

     Fabric with which you are going to wrap your wreath form

     Fabric with which you are going to create your fabric flowers

     (You'll see I had a red fabric here, but I changed my mind because I decided I liked the look of just the 

     orange against the gray chevron instead. So fickle, I am.)

Needle & coordinating thread

Hot glue gun

Take the fabric you are going to wrap your wreath with and cut it into pretty wide strips.

And then (duh) wrap your wreath, securing it with hot glue. If you have a geometric print or heavily patterned fabric, you can take the care to make sure each strip matches...if you like making yourself insane.

Wreath rocket science.

Then you're going to take your fabric for your flowers (in this case I chose a pretty orange satin fabric I had in my stash), and cut that into strips. I folded my strips in half lengthwise, wrong sides together, and should have pressed my crease but...(did you guess?) I am lazy lazy and I like the puffed up look of the crease when everything is finished, anyway.

Also, a fair warning to those of you who actually sew: I might make you hate me for this. I apologize in advance. Once I get a hold of learning how to use my sewing machine, I promise you I will take the time to press my creases, seams, whatever it is that needs pressing. Promise.

Anyway, take your needle and thread and run a stitch down the length of your folded fabric strip. PS: Use coordinating thread with your fabric.

And gather your strip into a ruffle. Can you tell I love ruffles?

Your fabric strip, once gathered, will become all curly-q ish. Don't fight your fabric strip's wants and needs and start rolling it around itself, making a pretty little flower.

See? How cuuuuuute.

Then you will want to take your needle and thread and run several stitches across the backside of your newly cutesy ruffled flower, making sure to grab each layer of the flower with your needle. Stitch until you feel that your flower is secure.

A terrible example in arrows. 

Keep making flowers as many times as you'd like, and then glue your flowers onto your wrapped wreath in any pattern you like. I'm all for simple, so I just made a cluster of three flowers on one side.

Hang it on your sassy red (or whatever color your door is, but I'm sure it's sassy regardless) and congratulate yourself for having versatile seasonal door decor.

Hope Monday is kind to you, friends!  I am staying home today while we get a leak in our air conditioning system fixed. We made it through the summer on a temporary fix back in June, but I'm excited to get it officially fixed.

Wanna see where I party? Click here for a list of link parties I participate in.

Also linking up with:
Autumn Abounds Link Party
Savvy Southern Style
Imparting Grace
Jennifer Rizzo

Five Friday Faves

Happy Friday, ya'll!

Can you believe it's the last weekend of September? Where did this month go?! Oh well, I say bring on October, baby!

I feel like I've phoned it in this week, friends, and for that I apologize. I've been sitting on some exciting news I can't wait to share with you all (in good time), which will result in a pretty big project!

Onto the Five Friday Faves for this week. You can, of course, follow me on Pinterest to follow along all week!

As always, please remember to pin from the sources, which I've provided below each image.

 source: Better Homes & Gardens

 source: Scavullo Design via Simplified Bee

 source: A Bowl Full of Lemons

 source: Style at Home

source: Sawdust Girl

Hope you enjoyed my fave pins for the week and that your weekend is awesome.

Got any big plans? I'm happy to admit that the only thing we have planned is a date night, wooooo!

10 Favorite Tailgate Recipes

I know Fall signals a lot of things:

Changing leaves.
The approaching holiday season.
Halloween.
Pumpkin spice everything.
Change in decor.
Fully appreciating the heated seats in your car.
Valid excuses to wear your Uggs again.

It means lots of things to a lot of people.

And for a lot of people, Fall signals the start of football season. I know this better than anyone, as our family Sunday dinners now revolve around when half-time is (kidding, only sort of).

I'll be the first person to admit that we are not football people ("we" as in husband and me...gasp!). We'll watch it, but we don't set aside our Saturdays for college football and our Sundays for pro football. If a game happens to be on, we'll watch, but we are by no means avid football fans.

I mean, I know what a down is and if you really made me do it, I could explain the fundamentals of the game to you, but...well...I think football is boring.

(THERE, I SAID IT. Can we still be friends?)

In fact, we're baseball people, but well---my precious Phillies did horribly this year and Denny's Red Sox clinched the American League East. I'm totally ready for the husband-gloating to calm down. It gives me the baseball sads.

Anyway.

What I do love about football season are tailgating and having a good reason to have a bunch of people over and feeding them (having people over and feeding them is like one of my favorite things ever).

We are big fans of appetizers and snacks and are known to make a meal out of dips and finger foods alone. So not healthy, but so much fun.

I'd like to share some of my favorite recipes for game day nom noms that I've found around the interwebs. These types of dishes are perfect for watching some football with your friends and family AND are some of the most delicious dips and finger foods. It's win-win!

Invite over a houseful and enjoy watching some football with these amazing recipes (remember to pin from the sources, please&thanks)!

 BBQ Meatball Sliders via Dessert Now Dinner Later

Fried Mac & Cheese via I Heart Naptime

Spinach, Artichoke & Bacon Stuffed Pretzels via Half Baked Harvest

Bacon Cheeseburger Eggrolls via Cooking With Divian

Baked Buffalo Chicken Taquitos via Foodista

Cheddar Bacon Ranch Pulls via Plain Chicken

Bacon Wrapped Jalapeno Chicken Bites via Salad In a Jar

Jalapeno Popper Dip via Closet Cooking

Buffalo Chicken Potato Skins via Lemon Tree Dwelling

Baked Fontina via Food Network

What's your favorite football team? Got any good recipes to share?

An Outdoor Update

I feel slightly guilty over not getting everything done that I mentioned in this post over the summer. I was really hoping that we'd get at least the front yard squared away, but summer happens and I decided that the beach was way more fun than yanking overgrown shrubs out of our garden beds.

In the last few weeks, we decided to play catch-up on all the work we've been procrastinating. Some of it was hired out and some not, but slowly but surely we're getting to where we want to be! Rome wasn't built in a day, after all. I need to remind myself that it's the steps that get us to the final result, and they don't all happen overnight.

So let's get started on some updates! 

You might remember in this post I shared a scary photo of our backyard looking like this:

After the trees were cleared. Terrifying.

I guess if you count the presence of crab grass covering up the dirt, it's looking a little (?) better:

Still makes me stabby. At least it's a little more green if you count the weeds.

We had two more zones added to our irrigation system recently, so once we have some REAL grass (and not atrocious weeds) it won't dry up in a day.

 

The exterior of our house was in need of a little love (no before photos, but one side of our house was slowly turning green), so we had it powerwashed. I tried to convince Denny that we could do this one ourselves, but I guess his idea of a good time is not on a ladder or scaffold with water blowing everywhere.

A view of the powerwashing from my front door.

We also decided that it was time to deal with the super invasive shrubs/monster plants in our front garden beds. While we appreciated the greenery, we weren't too fond of the fact that our bushes were spreading like crazy and were impossible to keep tidy-looking. They had to go, so we wrapped a super heavy duty chain around the trunk, hooked the other end of the chain to Denny's truck, and yanked those suckers out (PS: I don't actually condone doing this. A lot could have gone wrong, but I have a husband who flexes his truck muscles every once in a while and I was careful to get away from the area in case the chain went flying. Cutting down the shrubs at the ground or digging up the roots is really the safest way to go).

Don't worry, friends, we transplanted them to the wooded area behind our house. I figure they'll enjoy the space to spread and take over the world from back there.

It took a lot of yanking, digging, hacking, and pulling. We lost one shovel to the crazy root system of these bushes, evidenced below:

Now that front flower bed is looking pretty sparse, I transplanted an astro over there, as well as some mums I picked up at Home Depot for $0.88 each. Check out the cuuuuuute dead mums on the left. Oh yeah, and we picked up a tiny decorative grass plant (check out all the way to the right of the bed), which I'm sure will be giant eventually and we'll have to move it somewhere else.

It would look much better with a few more plants, some rhyme and reason to the layout and some mulch, but I'm glad to be starting with a blank slate for the Spring.

We'd still like to do a lot more, although it's looking like some of it will have to wait until Spring:

• Fence in the backyard.
• GET SOME SOD, ALREADY.
• Build a fire pit (most likely on the concrete slab that's just chilling in the middle of our yard)
• Stain our patio.
• Expand the front garden bed and build a garden wall to give it some definition (we tore out the plastic garden wall the weekend we moved into the house and forgot to replace it--the grass is quickly encroaching!).

And that's what we've been up to the last couple weeks with regard to the exterior of our home. Anyone taking advantage of the cooler temps to get a little yardwork done?

Wanna see where I party? Click here for a list of link parties I participate in.

Five Friday Faves

Heyooo, friends!

I'm going to keep it short and sweet today; after all, it's Friday!

Here are my five favorite pins on Pinterest this week. Enjoy!

(A friendly reminder to please pin from the source, which I've provided under each image)

 source: City Farmhouse

 source: Country Living

 source: Lauren Conrad

 source: Centsational Girl

source: Camille Styles

Enjoy your weekend, friends! I know I will.

Colorful No-Sew Fall Bunting Tutorial

In my post about the Fall decor in our home, you might have noticed this fun bunting (garland, banner, etc.) I added to the front of my buffet:

If you didn't notice it before, now you have!

Today I'm going to share with you how I made it. It's so easy and there is no sewing required which is my favorite kind of project. I have a sewing machine, but I am totally intimidated by it. One of these days I am going to tackle the beast that is my supposedly handy little machine, but today is not that day.

Your supplies:

You'll need:
Twine
Fabric of your choice cut into triangles with a "tab" at the top.
Fabric scissors - these are not my fabric scissors, but I had these out to cut my twine. Also, I hide my fabric scissors when I'm not using them because I will not have them mistaken for the other "common" scissors I have around the house.
Not pictured: hot glue gun

You can make the fabric triangles using a template of your choice traced onto cardstock or cardboard and trace onto the wrong side of your fabric. Take your fabric scissors (you know, the ones that ABSOLUTELY NO ONE EVER is allowed to touch. Except for you, because you're the boss) and cut out as many fabric triangles as you think you'll need.

I got a little overexcited and cut out about 25 of each color: gray chevron, orange satin, red, and yellow polka-dot. Note: if you're going for cute little touches of bunting, this is WAY too much. I have so much leftover I am going to start making it for whoever will just take it away from me already.

Here you can see the "tab" I mentioned above in the supply list. I folded each tab over (wrong sides facing) and pressed it with my iron to keep it in place. You are going to want to feed your twine under this tab.

Here is where the magic happens: take your glue gun and glue your tab down, sandwiching your twine between the fabric. Boom. Instant festivity. Congratulate yourself on being awesome without a sewing machine.

If you cut your tabs big enough, you could also just glue fabric to fabric so that the fabric triangle slides on and off the twine. This is awesome for a few reasons

     a.) You can adjust your fabric on the twine when hanging it
     b.) This makes it interchangeable. Think of the possibilities, friends!
     c.) It makes for easier storage since all you'll have to do is slide off your triangles when you're done
          displaying them and store them flat until you're ready to bust them out again. No tangled twine or
          wrinkled fabric. Hallelujah!

You may want to space out your flags evenly. You can have them closer together or further apart on your twine. I love this project because you can totally customize it to your liking--from the color of your fabric to how far apart you want your fabric spaced apart.

I used my cardboard template to space out my fabric.

Feel free to get completely out of hand and make YARDS of this bunting and hang it throughout your home.

My favorite is to hang the bunting across my windows:

I also hung some on my stair railing and maybe some on my child (kidding!). Love this.

But really, friends and family, if you want some of this, let me know. Girl's got way too much going on with this fabric over here.

Wanna see where I party? Click here for a list of link parties I participate in.

Also linking up with:
Imparting Grace; Jennifer Rizzo, Savvy Southern Style

Fall Decor in Our Home

Who is tired of talking about Fall yet?

Anyone? Anyone?

I'm really not. And, as a warning, I feel compelled to tell you that about 90% of my planned posts for the next four weeks revolve around Fall DIYs. So sorry not sorry? in advance, friends! As much as I love summer, I love all things Fall and everything it brings.

I thought I'd show you how I deck our halls with all things Fall. I love the colors of this particular seasonal decor. All the red, oranges, gold, and brown--there's so much richness and warmth involved. It automatically screams "cozy," and all the awesomely scented candles don't hurt, either.

I'll openly admit that my made-over buffet is really still the star of my living room, what with it's versatility and spacious horizontal surface (holla back more space to vignette it up in here!). Most of the decor is from Christmas Tree Shops, collected over the last few years. The old brown bottle and old mason jar are lucky finds, and the silver pedestal tray is a thrift store goodie. The lace-wrapped jar is a leftover from my wedding craft-o-palooza. The framed "Home Sweet Home" printable is from Going Home to Roost.

Oh! And the bunting was whipped up in an hour one afternoon. It's actually scattered throughout our house right now. I've got a tutorial in the works for that, too...no sewing required ;)

My (blurry? bahhhh) media cabinet also received it's share of Fall goodness, as well. As a matter of fact, so did the whole wall:

I found these shutters at Marshalls for $20 a piece. I snagged these before we even found our house, but I knew I had to have them and we'd find a spot for them. They were originally mail sorters, but I hung some mason jars with silk flowers on them to add a little something special. As it turns out, it makes that television a little prettier.

I change the flowers out with the season, but these are silk hydrangeas and peonies. Next year I'm hoping to have a thriving garden (besides the Astros, Calendula, and Morning Glory I have going now) so I can throw some fresh flowers into those babies.

This little table was given to us by Denny's aunt and uncle and sits in our foyer area. I'm so glad it found its way to me. I initially had the itch to paint it, but it's so sweet I'm going to leave it just so. My birdcage found its way here with another silk hydrangea, as well as two antique-looking lanterns I found in my shopping travels. The tin can was also a result of wedding craft-o-palooza, and I hand-rolled the burlap and lace roses and attached them to some craft store stems for a simple little bouquet.

And last but not least, my newly redone Powder Room (or W.C., as it's affectionately called now) got a few hints of Fall with some tinted tiny apple vase filler and some dollar-store gourds perched on my thrift store candle sticks.

That's it so far! As for the outdoors, I've made my Ruffled Burlap Wreath for the front door, planted some mums, and added a cute little wooden pumpkin on a stake near our front door, but that's really about it. Both our front and back yards are works in progress, but that's another post for another day.

What do you have going in your home? Do you decorate every room in the house? I think my kitchen is missing out on the action.

Linking up with:
The Inspired Room