DIY Fall Decor

There are lots of easy things you can do to decorate your home for fall, autumn, Thanksgiving, all the fun October and November times!  Look around to see what you have on hand, hidden away somewhere, like baskets and birdcages, then add some nature and raffia 🙂  Here are some of the things I came up with for this year….without really buying anything new except the hens and the moose….A few years ago I invested in a wicker cornucopia basket, so that always comes out of storage, to be filled with flowers or fruit for our Thanksgiving table.  Started with some fake flowers, then added some small red lights, some dollar store grapes and free picked nature!I loved the green vine flower things that I found on one of my walks, they really dried nicely…Baskets stuffed with nature:

A brown feather wreath for the front door:

This next photo isn’t home made, but could be….little stuffed hens on a beaded cord….our newest Fall decor addition to hang by the window and by our chore chalkboards in the kitchen:Also in the kitchen, a little gnome who doesn’t want to freeze outside (he’s also afraid of being gnome-napped), an old apple basket and our avocado plant, also afraid of freezing….

Another one of my little friends who always seems to be hanging around, the blackbird.  I just love watching the blackbirds, crows and magpies out the window in the fall…

Add in some of my favorites: pumpkins!

And if you can’t find real pumpkins, make some chubby stuffed pumpkins, no sew! Tiny colored frames from Michaels can be filled with black cardstock, then written on with chalk for a chalkboard look, add a big-eyed owl…
Some table decor:
Fruit and veggies always make colorful decorations.  This year’s splurge: a pomegranate!  And how about some fresh cranberries floating with some apples stuffed with candles….this was a combination of ideas that I pinned on my Fall Ideas Pinterest board.My Guatemalan textiles always come out for fall….ok, they’re always out, all year around!  And Pies are a great fall decor idea!!  And they are good for so many things….
Pumpkin, a tradition.My first cherry pie and dollar store ceramic pumpkins.A very old painted Canadian flag made by one of my kids a long long time ago.  Something else made by my kids: a clothespin wreath hanging on a chalkboard!My last DIY Fall Decor Idea: plant sunflower seeds in the spring and transfer them to your backyard for super Natural fall decor! 🙂  Doesn’t seem like ours bloomed early enough to get the seeds for eating, though…
Have a great rest-of-the-fall!!  Looks like it could snow in a couple of days around here…..so soon I’ll be packing up and disassembling my fall decor…..Christmas is coming!!! 🙂

Easy DIY No-Sew Fabric Pumpkins for Fall Decor

Easy as pumpkin pie….actually, much easier and faster than that!  Fasy, easy, temporary decor:  I’m all about these three this year.  These pudgy pumpkins are so easy to make, you can have a pumpkin patch in your living room in 10 minutes.  The “ingredients” for the pumpkins are materials that you probably have around your house….and if you don’t happen to have cinnamon sticks, maybe you could substitute something else….like small rolls of cardstock or cardboard.  And the best part is that you don’t have to sew anything!Materials:  (new or clean) dish towels, rubber bands or hair elastics, plastic shopping bags, some sort of string or yarn and/or raffia and whole cinnamon sticks.I was so happy to find a use for these tea-towels (that’s what I call dish towels, is that Canadian, eh?) that I bought for a fun Christmas project last year.  I had meant to use them for drying dishes after Christmas, but they ended up downstairs in the craft basement….and didn’t come to light until recently….hmmm, they’d make cute pumpkins!!!  Find the rest of the ingredients:Now grab the narrower end of a dish towel and accordion pleat it, but not perfectly, remember this is supposed to be fast.Pleat the other end, too, and fold in half.  You might have to hold one pleated end, while pleating the other end with one hand.  Don’t be perfectionist, it will all be fixable in the end.Lay the pleated ends out in a heart shape.  The idea is that the ends will be rubber-banded together, with the ends inside the pumpkin.  Now add a rubber band or hair elastic.You can vary how much of the end pleats are going to be inside the pumpkin, and so vary the size of the pumpkins.  Now pull the bottom of the “heart” down….And tie with some string, yarn or raffia.  Just a couple of regular knots will do to hold it.Start fluffing out the sides of the dish towel a bit.  You can add the stem of the pumpkin now, or later, it doesn’t really matter too much.  Grab a couple of sticks for a larger pumpkin, or just one stick for a smaller pumpkin, and insert them into the top, in the middle of the rubber-band “knot”.  Now stuff the pumpkin with loosely balled-up plastic bags, opening up the pleats a bit, and arranging them to cover any plastic bag that peeks out through the side cracks.  And that’s it!!Later, I decided to tie some raffia around the cinnamon stick stem, to give the look of leaves and vine tendrils.It took about 10 to 15 minutes to make 7 pumpkins for my “patch”.  The yellow pumpkin is a table runner, folded in half.  The two smaller brown pumpkins were bits of fabric from Walmart, those ones that are smaller than a fat quarter, something like 18″ by 21″ or whatever.  They were from last year’s project, too.  I had been looking at fabric pumpkins, but didn’t want to sew, or permanently use up my small stash of fabric, so this worked out perfectly.  I can pull them apart and use my tea-towels for drying dishes (if I want, ha) or anything else.

Nutella-filled Cookie Tarts for Fall

Mmmm Nutella!  I have noticed several posts on facebook about the *surprising* evils of Nutella.  It’s not the “healthy” food we thought.  Or is it.  I always knew that something that yummy couldn’t possibly be healthy, so I don’t feel that I was led astray by advertising.  I don’t even remember discovering the deliciousness of Nutella until I was a grown-up.  Ah well, someone special brought me a treat the other day….2 jars of Nutella!  And all of a sudden I felt a crazing* for Nutella and cookies. Together. In one bite.  I was just going to spread it on a plain cookie, then sandwich it with another cookie, but then I started looking at photos of Nutella-filled cookies, and more goodies made with Nutelllllllllla 🙂  I had fun.  Then I decided to kind of adapt a bit and try spooning the chocolaty sweet into cute little pastry shells, but made from cookie dough.  I grabbed the idea from Chef Cathy here and adapted the cookie dough recipe a bit from Lilaloa who has great cookie recipes.  And boy did it turn out well!!  (Not like all of my experiments!)  Chef Cathy calls them Cookie Pies, but I just have to call them Tarts, because that’s what they look like, a good-old Canadian butter tart shell, in miniature!         (* a crazing is a crazy craving!!  I just mispelled that and thought it quite clever!)The cookie dough recipe:

Makes about 40 mini tarts

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup of white sugar (a heaping cup, or 2/3 cup)

1 egg

1/2 tsp. each of vanilla and orange extract

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. baking powder

2 cups of all purpose flour

Beat the butter and sugar together.  It might be nice to use room temperature butter, but mine was fairly cold, and it still works.  Add in the egg and beat a bit more.  Add in vanilla and orange extract, and any food coloring if you want.  I added some orange coloring, but it came out very pale-looking!  Throw in the salt, and keep mixing.  Sprinkle the baking powder over the batter, then one cup of the flour and mix.  Add in the last cup of flour and mix.  (Or you can do it the traditional way!)  The dough was fairly stiff and just a bit dry, so I worked it a bit with my hands at the end.  No need to chill!

Roll out the dough, and use a round cookie cutter that is a bit larger than the openings of a mini muffin pan.  I used a scalloped one.Cut out the rounds and gently press them into the mini muffin tin.  (I used the rounded handle of a spatula to ever so gently tap them down a bit).  I had greased the pan for the first batch, but later found out that that wasn’t necessary if it is a non-stick pan.I didn’t push the shells all the way to the bottom of the cups, and that seemed to work great.  Now with  2 teaspoons, fill each shell with Nutella, about a teaspoon each.  I used a small teaspoon (baby sized) and acutally twirled the Nutella into the shells a bit after these ones were sticking up a bit too much, and that worked well.Out of the cookie dough, I used a very small cutter and cut out some maple leaves to pop on top.  The cutter was from one of those linzer cookie cutters that fell apart, so now I just use the middle cutter-outter piece for tiny cookies.  Or you can just crumble up some dough and sprinkle it on top, which is what Chef Cathy did!  Now bake at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes.They popped out of the pan after sitting a few minutes, very nicely and were golden enough and had cute little bottoms!Have a bite!!! or two!I decided that I like them cold, instead of warm out the the oven.A sprinkle of cinnamon on the plate was nice, too…I originally just baked up half of the dough, and thought I would save the rest for something else.  But these little cuties disappeared so quickly and were so yummy, the next day I baked up another batch!  That’s why I’m kind of guesstimating that the recipe made 40 mini tarts, we ate them so fast, and a fair bit of cookie dough was munched up, too, so that’s the closest I could come for a number!  These would look super on a Canadian Thanksgiving Table next week!!  Or on an American Table in November.  Or on anyone’s table at any time this fall!  If you like Nutella, I’m pretty sure you will like this easy recipe! 😉