paint cut paste

admittedly, i got all jazzed about pinterest painted pumpkins this year. i mean, have you seen the options?! it’s intense out there. martha is quaking in her fryes with the sheer amount of pumpkin talent run amok on the interwebs. and lemme tell ya, i am NO  threat to ms. stewart in any way, shape, or form. let’s talk total craft fail right now (and a quasi-recovery?) here are some of the pinterest gems that piqued my pumpkin passion.

you know i don’t use the words “craft” or “fail” much at all, (for totally different reasons) but this is a complete craft fail (do i have to put a hashtag in front of that term? eww, lingo.) and instead of ___fail, i’d rather just call it an art-gone-wrong moment. (but yes, #craftfail!) i was inspired to make some painter’s tape resist pumpkins (like bottom left pic above) and three pumpkins with B O O stenciled onto them. i figured they’d be all beautiful and i’d title the blog “smashing pumpkins” and everything. i bought these super inexpensive beauties at a produce stand.

taped and stickered them where i wanted them to remain orange.

i grabbed some matte spray paint, and went to town.

(the only thing that was cool here was the caravaggesque lighting of these photos, and that was an accident)

after the paint dried, i peeled off the tape and stickers… um, and MOST OF THE SPRAY PAINT! (grrr)

for the B O O pumpkins, i thought i’d use these cool vinyl letter stickers i bought at michael’s, but large stickers do not stick in any sort of flat way to a rounded pumpkin surface, so i knew they would not produce a clean line when painted around. so i thought (sure, just for like two seconds) and grabbed some rubber cement and painted the letters B O O onto the pumpkins instead.

i figured the rubber cement would roll right off after they were painted and show the letters i had carefully designed by hand. perhaps this would have worked (???) if i had NOT USED SPRAY PAINT!

so i dropped this agenda altogether. i purchased three white pumpkins. i stuck the vinyl letters onto them as best i could. i traced around the letters with a pencil. i painted inside my pencil lines with sepia acrylic ink.

and it worked out well enough for this year.

pumpkins drying against sliding glass door - fun effect

and now onto designing the rest of the mantel…

in creating our fall mantel (after plenty of pinterest research, of course) i decided we needed an indoor autumn wreath. i scored a really cool paned window at the salvage yard a couple of weeks ago, and it was begging for a little adornment. i’ve seen these cute little felt flowers all over the internet lately, and thought we’d give them a shot.

i purchased a $4 grapevine wreath from michael’s as the base. decor-wise, i straddle the line (not so elegantly) between rustic and modern, and the grapevine wreaths are definitely on the earthier side of things. i was hoping some sleek felt spirals would make them somehow more chic. N helped me to select some autumn colors of felt at michael’s, too. we decided to stay with just three colors. she had fun helping out in the whole process, which helps her to take pride in her creations as part of our home.

though i had seen the felt flowers around the blogosphere, i wasn’t quite sure where i first saw/pinned them and how to begin. after i conducted a search for a video tutorial, i coincidentally landed on my high school friend, beth’s, AMAZING blog, Home Stories A2Z, and she taught me and N how to do it! love that!

we followed beth’s clear directions, and it was suuuuper simple. N even made a flower of her own (but i did the hot glue part, of course.)

the flowers turned out rather cute! (i can see how it could get addictive… i now want to make N a headband with smaller versions of these on it!)

now to figure out the rest of the mantel… my painted pumpkin project for halloweening the mantel has been a total craft-fail so far. i’ll share about that soon…

a work in progress...

do you do a fall mantel or halloween mantel or switch it up? what’s warming your hearth this season?