A Fall Garland

Hello lovely friends!  I hope you are having a fabulous fall!  I don't know about you, but starting about October 1st, I get all geeked out for this season.  As far as I'm concerned, October, November and December are the best months of the year.  (Let's not talk about the crash and burn that happens around January 2nd.  It's not so pretty!  You can read about my feelings on that here.)

I recently did a quick little project that I thought I'd share with you.  I love this because it can be used year after year, and frankly those are the only ones I'm interested in!  I hate spending my hard-earned free time on something that will only last for a few weeks, like seasonal wreaths or other decorations that will die and then I have to do them all again next year.  Blah.

But this one is easy, and, better yet, has held up with the rain and still looks good after over a month outside.  So I consider that a win!  

See that garland?  Here, let me zoom in a bit.

Super simple!  I started with a tutorial I had saved from years ago from A Soft Place to Land.  You can see her easy instructions here.  My gourds and pumpkins came from Hobby Lobby.  The pine cones came from my yard.  (Want to come over?)

A few notes about how to make this: The gourds on the link above are hollow (read: easier to work with!), but mine ended up having some kind of styrofoam inside.  So I used a screwdriver to poke from one side to the other, and then grabbed my daughter's oversized plastic sewing needle to thread the twine through.  Once the twine was strung, I was very generous with the hot glue gun at the entry points!  Lastly I sprayed them with a clear varnish because I was worried that rain would cause the gourds to streak or fade (they are fake, after all!) and so far they still look new.

You may remember my numbered pumpkins from years ago too!  Last fall I only had four of them (because that's how many I could dig up at the Goodwill).  A friend came over and said "Oh, are these supposed to represent your family?  One for each of you?"  Well...No.  But then, all of a sudden, Yes!  And oh-my-gosh, we don't have a pumpkin for baby Vivi and isn't that the most horrible thing in all the world and it is absolutely unacceptable that my poor little girl isn't included in this super-meaningful brand-new family tradition!  So I tore out and bought a sweet little itty-bitty pumpkin so that a number five could be stenciled and all our people are represented.  Crazy much? :)

I love how warm and welcoming our hallway looks this time of year.  Too bad most of my visitors come through the back door, which is decidedly less glamorous. (But better somehow that way too, I agree!)

My local Trader Joe's had all these little gourds and pumpkins (and yes, these are real but it didn't require any hot glue or crafty business so I was willing to splurge!).  I love to put these out at the beginning of October and let it ride until the day after Thanksgiving.  If they get a little moldy, oh well.  They're outside!

And just in keeping with the porch theme of this post, here's our little family about to go trick-or-treating.  The pirate fairy, shadow ninja and baby ladybug wish you a Happy Fall!