DIY Autumn / Fall Home Decor - TUTORIAL!

Hi everyone, it's Lou Collins. Now as the weather's got a little bit cooler I want to make sure my home is feeling nice and cozy and I'm going to be creating some home decor suitable for the autumn or fall season and I've got the perfect item that's just back in stock at Craftstash, it's the embroidery hoops. I'm going to be using the largest embroidery hoop in this die set to create a frame for some beautiful autumnal leaves. So join me down at my desk as I walk you through a step by step this entire project but you can find everything I've used linked in the description below. Now I've already made a start with this project in that I've cut things out and I've done a little bit of inking so that it doesn't take quite so long for you to watch but this, as I say, is the set that I'm focusing on. Now this set comes with three embroidery hoops, there's a large, a medium and a small. It also comes with the fabric corners as well that you can add in if you wish and a really cute sentiment. So I'm focusing on the largest of the hoops, this is around about seven inches by seven inches or it's going to fit on a seven inch card base if that's how you like to use it but I like to try and stretch my items and see if I can use them in different ways and that's exactly what this project is about, creating something lovely for the home. So I've die cut the embroidery hoop and I needed to use my large platform die cutting machine for this and I have cut four from craft cardstock. Now I can add more later if I want to, if I feel like I need to but at the moment I think four is going to be enough and initially I'm going to glue all four of these together using some wet glue. Today I'm going to be using my Sizzix Express glue but any wet glue will work. Now it really depends whether you're going to want to put this finished piece on your front door so it needs to be weather resistant or whether you're going to have it inside the home. For me this is going to go inside my home so I don't need to worry about the items as in the paper, the glue being waterproof or water resistant but there's lots of materials out there that you can die cut that are water resistant if you wish or you can finish your project with a layer of something like a mod podge or sealant so that you can use it outside. So just placing all four layers together with the glue there and that has substantially strengthened the frame now so that will stand up if I wish it to. I could hang that as well. Now I've also cut from some gold mirror card just the top piece because this is the screw that tightens the hoop together so I'm going to use some small scissors just to trim the screw away from the wooden pieces and I'm going to also place that in. So just a couple of snips, one there and one there so I'm imagining we've got the whole top piece is going to be metallic or gold. I like to use gold but you can use silver as well and that's going to be glued over the top as well. Now usually I would put a piece of fabric or a piece of fabric looking paper inside of this but I'm going to leave it open today. I don't want it to look like an actual piece of embroidery, I want to add faux leaves around here and keep it fairly open. This way as well whatever backing I use it doesn't matter if it doesn't match the decor of my home or the room that I'm putting it into. So for decoration I'm going with some leaves. I've chosen four colors from the Distress range. I've got Forest Moss, Rusty Hinge, Carved Pumpkin and Crackling Campfire and I've gone with two die sets from my Textures range. These are stamping die sets. I've got the Fern and Leaves, this is from the Woodlands collection. I'm going to be using the Fern Leaves and I've got some roughly ink blended ink here onto a cream cut stock because I didn't want the bright white showing through and I'm going to cut probably around four of these on here and then from the Foliage Wreath and this comes from the Spring Awakening collection, I have just stamped lots of these individual leaves. Now these are half tone leaves, another reason for me to use the ivory cardstock and not be using a bright white cardstock, so that kind of blends in a little bit and looks like natural leaf highlights as you can see mist areas on the stamps, that's that half tone effect so you get light and dark within them. Again those same four colors as I've just mentioned I've used as well as two colors on the ink blending here, now that all I need to do is die cut everything out. Now both these die sets with the leaves included, I'll make sure they are linked down in the description below for you, at the moment they are both still in stock. So I've got my leaves all cut out and as you can see the ones with the ink blended background are absolutely beautiful. Now you could actually use these dies and just do some ink blending rather than the stamping, it's entirely up to you but I like the contrast between the more deeply colored ones and the lighter ones and to add even more texture to just this sort of bottom left hand portion of the wreath or of the embroidery hoop I'm going to add some, this is like a burlap ribbon, I'm going to wrap this around and this is just going to give me a little bit of bulk that I can then start weaving my leaves in and out of. So I've cut one of the corners or one of the ends into like a fishtail and I'm going to be using a hot glue and I'll just place the end around about here, this is where I want the end of the wreath to be and I'm going to wrap this round a few times and when I'm happy with the positioning and the shape, now I'll do this tightly to start with but I'll reposition in a moment, I'm going to do the same here so I'm going to trim these ends just like so and I'm going to stick this end where I'd like the wreath to kind of finish or rather the foliage to finish so somewhere like this is perfect and then these pieces in the middle I can now start spacing out and just add a few drops of glue probably more to the back until I've got that the sort of shape that I want it to be which something like that will be perfect. Now I do prefer to use a hot glue although at the moment I'm quite enjoying using a cool melt hot glue gun so it's still hot but not as hot as usual glue guns get, this means I don't quite burn my fingers quite as often but this helps me attach everything really nicely and quickly particularly to the fabric ribbon. So now with my ribbon all in place I can start positioning my leaves, now I always start with the largest leaves first to build up the base and these are all going to be tucked into the ribbon like so, so I'm going to put a good amount of glue on each particularly of these larger ones because they will be more underneath everything so we won't see the glue as such and I'm going to be attaching them a little bit to the hoop and a little bit to the twine, I'm going to start with the larger ones like I say and then work my way up to the smaller ones so just applying the glue down the center of the leaves and because this is a cool melt glue gun like I say still hot but not as hot it does mean that the glue does dry a little bit faster than usual so I need to act just slightly quicker. So inside each of these loops made by the twine the ribbon I'm going to pop a large leaf this is just building up that structure and that like I say that bulk that body of the foliage first of all and then I can use my accent pieces which are my smaller ones there afterwards so I'm just popping this last of the four large leaves now that already looks really beautiful as it is I don't need a huge amount more to that if I didn't want to if I wanted something quite simple but now I'm going to start adding in my additional leaves around here and as you can see that cream really does work much better than a bright white would have so again starting with the larger leaves I'm going to place these in and I tend to go from the center so the center of this portion and push everything out so anything from here will be facing this way anything from here will be facing this way so again starting with the larger ones just I might snip some portions off if I find they're a bit too large I'm trying to put the glue on the underneath of each of them and wiggle them in there somewhere there we go just like so so I'm now going to speed up the process of me gluing these leaves on so you can see how I go about it but without sitting through the whole thing now although I've got a few leaves left I feel like I've got enough on there I'm now going to find some small gems or pearls just to dot around and I think I'd like to find gold or yellow something nice and bright and sparkly for this to really capture the light and one is going to go just here now here I've created a small spiral of leaves going in all directions and there's going to be a couple in the center here to kind of anchor those down and that's where everything stems from either going in this direction or this direction now regarding some sort of gems I've found two things in my stash I found some small wooden buttons which I think will just work beautifully and I've also found a few sparkly pieces in greens and oranges and these are also going to work really well so I'm going to just scatter a few of these around the leaves I'm not going to go any further than where I put the ribbon and the leaves at the moment but these are going to be really nice little accents to finish off this piece now this is where I get a little bit messy so I've finished gluing everything on there at the moment I am going to put a small title a small message on there but that's completely optional I am going to use two spritzes these are distress spritzes so they are a shimmery mica settled within a clear liquid so I'm not going to overpower this with color but I want to add a little bit of shimmer with some splatters so I'm going to shake both of these this is the walnut stain and the spiced marmalade and I'm going to give a little bit of a spritz over some of the areas of the leaves now with these you want to shake them until you can hear the metal ball inside rattling around which you can with this one not yet with this one so I'm going to keep going here there we go now I put a mat down on my craft desk just to protect it and I'm going to from a distance just do some small splats we'll take a closer look at this once it's dry now this die set is amazing it's one of my favorites from textures not only because it has text in it but also it is so adaptable now I know that at the moment there's only a handful of these items left in stock but I will still list it in the description for you but if it's out of stock any other label style kind of sentiment or die or stamp will also work on this project so I want to have a sentiment that I can just each year or each season maybe just switch over to say something different I'm going to say something like welcome this year um but I can then remove that and just change it next year if I want to so I'm going to use this and as you can see there's 66 dies in the set there's absolutely loads and I'm going to use it to create the word welcome that's black on a white background so some tips for using this particular die set I'm going to take some low tack tape you could use something like washi tape or masking tape I'm going to place a piece across the back of the strip that I've chosen now the strips come with different numbers of notches for your letters and so make sure you choose one with that has either the correct amount of notches for your letters or more because you can trim the strips down afterwards this one has 11 there aren't many words that have more than 11 letters so you should all be good with that so because I want to use the word welcome I'm going to use this one and this one has eight notches so I'm going to now find my letters and place them in now you need to remember that you want to be writing backwards because you're going to turn this over it's going to be a die so of course it needs to be backwards and with each letter you have actually got a little tab at the top and bottom of the die and that perfectly sits it into the frame for you so you can easily see where you're putting everything and this also keeps your spacing perfect too now the beauty of this die set also is you can spell maybe unusual names or phrases that you just can't get at the moment in stamp or die form so now I need some black and white cardstock you can choose of course any color you wish and I'm just going to place this down onto my black cardstock and die cut that out now once you've die cut this you're going to have your letters that remove from the strip as you can see here now you can save these letters they're really handy to save a little stash off and you can use them another time maybe not in label form but for here we're not actually going to be using these because we're going to be using the negative now also don't forget inside something like an o or a q you want to be saving the centerpiece to pop back into later so I'm going to trim my strip down because I didn't have that eighth letter so just look at the width between the edge and the start of that letter and try to repeat that same sort of width just here to make it even and then adhere this over some white cardstock and I can trim my white cardstock down afterwards just for a bit of detail I'm also going to add a couple of little staples to this just to make it look as if this has been stapled onto the wreath I'm going to do that just at one end and then again using my hot glue gun I'm going to put a lot of hot glue on this and I'm going to attach it making sure my wreath is nice and straight and I'm going to just pop this against the leaves making sure that is where I want it to sit perfect I'm happy with that now all I need to do is either place it in my home or hang it and I could use some twine and hang it I'm going to see where it's going to sit first and decide but if I do decide to do this I would simply turn this over and just adhere probably again with the hot glue and two ends of twine to the tops here to hang it up so here it is in situ looking absolutely lovely and welcoming my guests for an autumn or fall season you can do this as something like a piece of table decor maybe a wedding decor it's entirely up to you but the embroidery hoops are going to come in really handy for lots of different projects and also for your card making and your scrapbooking again you'll find all the links down in the description below thank you for joining me everybody I hope you've enjoyed this and I'll see you again very soon take care bye