Front Porch Sign

I can't believe it's been almost two weeks since my last post! Hopefully that won't happen again. This new job has had me working during the day and then coming home to learn more about material I needed to know at night, so needless to say the fun stuff got put on hold :(

Don't worry though... I completely decorated my officle (next post) :)

Anyways... our front porch was looking dull... a little too dull... and after reading some tutorials from the Fabulous Miss Mustard Seed (Mustard Seed Creations) I decided I wanted to tackle our own sign.

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine asked me to grab some palates (we have them all over the place because of all the new houses going up). So I thought "D, you should grab one for yourself just in case." So glad that I did! I tore off some of the wood slats, glued them together, and it gave me the foundation for the sign. These boards worked great, because they were all beat up.... which is what exactly what I wanted.

Then I used the Cricut to cut own my stencil just to make sure they were the size I wanted

I then randomly brushed a "antique white" paint, to help give it a type of aged look... Just enough to where some wood was still peeking through...

Then traced on the letters...

Then PAINSTAKINGLY painted in the letters... Let me just say this... I'm a pretty patient person and typically like projects that are very meticulous in nature... but this got the best of me! I don't know how some of you sign makers do it! It took so long!

After painting in the rest of the letters, I then went ahead and sanded down in random places, then applied a coat of walnut stain over the entire sign, and it turned out exactly as I'd hoped :)

I drilled my holes and attached the signs together with hemp, then topped it off with a little garland from Hobby lobby... and got this :)

One last look!

Now here's my issue... it's too heavy...lol. Of course right?!?!? I tried using one of those 3m sticky hooks outside, but when I tried to put it on it came right off... I just talked to my dad, and pretty much said that because our house is stucco, if I try and nail or screw something in I could crack a whole piece of the stucco off...

So does anyone have any ideas?!?

Faux Fall Tree

I'm so excited to decorate (for the first time) for fall! My house was basically made to be decorated for fall because of all of the warm colors we have:) I'll probably only be doing a couple of projects because I want my house to "barf" Christmas... so I'd rather use my craft budget for Christmas projects this year. Nevertheless, I'm still going to decorate just a bit!

This is one of my first "fall" projects. I really wanted to decorate our front porch, because I feel like that is the place that will work best for fall decorations. So that's where we'll start!

Last weekend while Mr. Husband washed our cars, I cleaned out the garage. Yes, we've only lived in this house for 4 months, and I've already had to clean out the garage! It's mostly because I've been using my half of the car for bigger craft projects instead of using it to park my car :)

These are the branches that came from the ladder project. I only used about half of them, so they kind of just hung out on the side of the garage.... wasn't working out too well!

So I stripped off all of the leaves until I had just the twigs left... I first took them and arranged them the best that I could (can't really work with twigs !)....

Then wrapped the bottom with hemp... not only to hold them together, but to somewhat resemble the trunk of a tree

then made sure it looked okay before I moved to the next step...

I thought it kind of looked a bit too bare, so out to the spray paint field it went! I wrapped the hemp with a plastic bag, and spray painted the top brown...

So glad I did it... looks so much more "fall-y"!!

While I was out in the spray paint field, I decided that the green pot just wasn't going to work... so I started spray painting it with a brushed gold color...

and I swear I didn't do this on purpose... but guess what I ended up spraying?!?! I guess this is why you're supposed to wipe down stuff before you spray paint, but who has the patience for that?

Does this just make you shiver?!?! The spray paint pretty much fossilized Mr. Spider... so I left it on there... gives it more of a Halloween look... and I hope someone touches it to "see if it's real", because guess what kids... it is :)

And no I'm not joking... it's still on there

Back to the tree! I really only spent around $10 on this entire project, and the $10 was spent on all the leaves and twigs from Michaels and Hobby lobby. All the fall stuff is pretty much on sale right now, so I totally took advantage of it.

Also... I now it's crazy (and tempting) that they've started to put out all of the Christmas stuff already, but totally use it to your advantage! If they have orange, yellow and red stuff, you can still use it for fall! For example, a cute orange bird.. I also used glittery apples and twigs that had beads and glitter on them, which were all in the Christmas section!

Then I simply clipped everything off of their wire stems, and hot glued it on to the tree.... and after what seemed like HOURS... here is what you get, for next to nothing!

Don't mind the dirt... I still hadn't picked it up :)

Here's Lola the bird....

and her boyfriend Butch :)

On a side note, I already had this pot sitting out with flowers in it, so I just replaced them with leftover foilage I had from the tree...

I still have to change out the covers for the rattan chairs, and the wall desperately needs some type of sign or something... but I'm okay with it so far!

One more close look!