It's October!

Hello!  It's October!  First though, the 2013 Room for Color winners are in!  Um, once again, not it, but also once again, I didn't participate to win (although it would be nice).  Go take a look at the winning rooms.

Back to October...

The decorations are slowly going up.  I have a paper pumpkin assembly line in my living room and I have a theme.  This year I'm doing pumpkin patches, but probably a haunted pumpkin patch for the house and a cutesy patch for the faux office.

2013 Halloween wreath

I used scavenged materials from Octobers past to make a wreath.  I also painted the face of the pumpkins with glow paint, but I have no idea if it's actually working.  I like it.  I bought two wire wreath frames from the thrift store a while ago so I might make another one or just wait and do a general Fall wreath.

All Hallows Mess

Here you can see a variety of projects piled together.  A sewing pile on the dress form, a witch hat waiting to be hung, and the first 3 pumpkins in my faux pumpkin patch.  Right now I am very much into DIY decorative lawn stakes.  They make a big impact and as long as there are boxes to recycle and acrylic paints, I can make them.  I just glue sticks to the back and pop them in the ground.

Lawn stakes from Amazon.

Above are the decorations that I ordered.  They're a little smaller than I expected, but they're nice.

Mums

Don't forget the mums!  I ran out of nice planters to put them in, so here's a festive grocery bag.  It's rustic right?  the colors work.  I put a drip tray in the bottom so I'm not ruining the bag.  I was content with my thrifty solution.

Pumpkin Pouf

Over the summer, I bought a 20lb box of Poly-Fil.  If you aren't familiar with this product, that's A LOT of Poly-Fil (more than I realized).  So I've been making poufs and cushions.  Of course all of the outdoor poufs are in my summer colors and patterns.  I wanted to keep them on the porch because we use them a lot, but I wanted to include them in my fall decorating.  The Great Pumpkin Pouf cover is the solution.  I'm also going to try to make some black cat floor cushions, but those aren't done yet.  Pumpkin pouf is a giant fabric pumpkin, but I didn't have to stuff it because I slid my outdoor pouf inside, tied it with twine, and then wrapped the excess fabric in green to make a stem.  You follow the basic instructions for fabric pumpkins, but you use a piece of fabric large enough to cover your pouf.  Then you skip a few of the sewing steps; I rubber banded the bottom closure instead of sewing and I just wrapped twine around the pouf to make the pumpkin segments (for the fabric pumpkin you would sew through the center of the form, but that just isn't going to work for something this big).

xoxo, 

pumpkin patch

b

Room for Color 2013

hey, that's my little rental kitchen.

Hello lovely blog visitors.  If you have a minute, will you give me a favorite?  There are a lot of great rooms to look at too.  Voting ends at noon on Friday the 27th.

xoxo,

colorful b

The Finalists Are In!

...and I am not it, but that's okay!

The international Small Cool 2013 winner

I had a goal and that was to make the cut; I did.  Then I added the goal of not being lowest in votes; I was not (close to it, but NOT it).  This time around my goals were achieved.   I learned a few things and I feel as if I took a small step forward in whatever this is that I'm out here doing on the inner webs.  Bunting is controversial and I am naive and each of these things is fine.  I will however be submitting a photo of a non-bunted living/dining area when I finally take all the bits down.  Not that they've asked and not that the comments are making me do it, but that it's over due for removal and out of season.  That was winter decor; it's time to move on.  Anyway, you can vote for the over all winner today through tomorrow.  Give 'em a looky-loo right here.

great big X's and O's,

We have gave garden boots to obsess about soon

b

Pin-doing

I'm impressionable or maybe I'm just curious, but I have a tendency to run out and do what I read or see.  Yesterday Apartment Therapy told me that geraniums are easy to grow so when I went on break from work, I bought some (of course I pinned the article first).  Today they are already living in my yard.  Several days ago I was reading Young House Love's 2013 Pinterest Challenge.  They did window boxes so I rushed home and pulled mine out of the garage.  They are up and flowing with flowers now.

How did I choose my honeymoon location?  I read about it on Poppytalk.  How did I choose this year's first anniversary vacation destination?  I saw a photo of an amazing place on Pinterest.  Once I figured out this spot was in the US, it was on.

I've read a lot about people sitting and pinning, getting lost for hours in all that visual candy, but not exactly doing.  That isn't me, obviously.  I can only look at a screen for so long.  I have to be doing.  So my new term is pin-doing (say it all together and make it flow).  Sometimes it isn't exact pin-doing, but adapting something I've seen into something else.  Regardless, I usually pin it for keeping or find it pinned.

Anyway, I've made peace with my addiction, but sometimes I think the internet should just stop showing me things.

This was taken the day I read about window boxes.  Yesterday, the lawn was mowed, the beds were edged, and geraniums found a home.  I'll post the progress next week.

xoxo,

an ever curious b

Small Cool

This picture contains a couple of completed and recent DIY's!

Hi, I know I've been gone for awhile.  There was some some life stuff happening and I had to process it.  Once I got that done though, I got back to doing, but not posting.  Anyway, I did submit an entry to the Apartment Therapy Small Cool contest and they accepted.  My goal was simply to get my entry posted so I am quite excited, but since I'm already there, I might as well go for it.  If you have a minute it would be great of you to go give my entry a favorite.  You can use this link.

I am excited just to be there and I have my own criticisms of my entry.  I will apologize now for the beyond rough, hand drawn floor plan.  I couldn't locate a real one and Mr. Husband forgot to crank one out so I finally just sucked it up and roughed it.  I keep feeling the need to address every negative (or just not entirely positive?) comment posted and I know I don't have to, but this is just me.  Ima' gonna' cleanse myself here though.

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My Cleanse: you've been warned!

Garlands appear to be controversial.  I like them, but most of all, I like making them.  The ceiling is a great place for storage, especially if you have cats.

It actually isn't dusty and there are no spiderwebs.  How is this possible?  I keep them cleared out.  I was bitten by a brown recluse once and I won't be doing that again.

We are fans of Kitsch.

We constantly have stuff flowing through the house and back out; Mr. Husband has an eBay store and we're artists.

It is dark in there; it's a duplex and there's a lot of stuff near the house that blocks light.

Finally, the house does have 2 bedrooms and 1.5 baths.  My second biggest (or maybe it comes first) criticism of my entry is that I wasn't able to show more of it.  I am far from being a professional photographer and I'm working around a house husband and an adolescent to keep the house clean.  So it was a race to get the home from work in time to get a room organized and still have enough natural light to get a decent photo of it before the chaos happened again.  Real life, who knew?

Done, thanks for playing along.

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Okay, I'm done.  I feel a bit better now, but this is a different kind of experience than I thought it would be and I'm learning some skills that I hadn't thought about as being part of this process.  I think I'm going to go with the positive and say that I am an artist and perhaps my work is just controversial (That works right?).  Still, I'm excited and thanks to you for reading.

xoxo,

b