10 Simple and Cheap DIY Fall Home Decor Ideas

Not all DIYs go as planned, but these 10 simple and cheap fall decor ideas won't fail. We promise. We're styling each piece in our homes and we're showing you our worst fail ever. So stay till the end so you can see the destruction. Okay. First up, we're going to do a fun fall floral arrangement in an old train case. All right. I picked up this fun train case at the vintage market several years ago. I already swapped out the mirror that was up top with some blue and white stripes ticking fabric just to bring in a little bit more texture and color. I'm going to fill the bottom of this with some plastic bags just as a filler. That way we don't have to use the whole train case to fill with the styrofoam. So we've trimmed this to fit just inside and it's nice and snug, which is what we want. And then we're going to cover that up with a little bit of Spanish moss. And now we're going to just put in a couple different sunflowers and, you know, I feel like I'm not the best with floral arrangements. She's not very confident at it, but I want you to see how great she does. Well, yeah, you know, practice does help, but we're just placing these in three in the back and then we'll do two in the front. But, you know, you want them varying heights so it looks as natural as possible. And now we're going to toss in a couple of different pumpkins. We picked these up at Dollar Tree several years ago. I painted some of them white. These other ones were. What is that? Burlap. I couldn't think of the word. Yeah. Just so it has a little bit of texture. It's neutral color just to give a little bit of variety to this little arrangement. So I think those are super cute. And now I'm going to tuck in some leaves that were pulled off from the sunflowers just to add a little bit more greenery down near the bottom of this train case. And to add a little bit of height and movement to this floral arrangement, we're going to use some pampas grass. We just cut these from the side of the road and they're going to just be perfect for this fall arrangement. Look at that fun texture that it adds. So get creative when you're creating a floral arrangement and use weeds or sticks or whatever you can find. And they can really add a lot of variety and interest to your arrangements. Next up we're going to make a fall garland using that packing paper that comes in those Amazon boxes. If you're like us, you have a lot of this packing paper and I've been kind of saving it up thinking it would be fun to craft with. So we're going to take the paper and we're going to kind of fold it back and forth till we have five layers of the paper. And then I'm just going to use a sewing pin and I'm going to pin my little template of a leaf. I've got an oak leaf and a maple leaf and just pinning it right to the paper. And then we'll just cut around and cut out our leaves. And by folding these into fifths or however many layers you want to do, it really sped up the process, but it didn't even make it harder to cut. It was really simple to do. To make these leaves a little more realistic, we're going to crumple them up and then we're going to take some antique gold Rub and Buff and I'm just going to rub a little bit here and there on both sides of all of the leaves. And to add a little more texture to the leaves, we're going to just take a brown ink pad and we're going to just kind of drag it across the paper and it's going to highlight all or low light. I'm not sure. Highlight or low light all of those little creases that we added to the leaf. It just makes all of that texture show a little bit better, gives a little more depth and dimension. All right, now that all the leaves are ready, we're still going to crumple them up a little bit here and there, and we're going to just use a hot glue gun to glue them directly onto a piece of twine. And we did measure out the length of the twine where we want to hang this and then placed a knot where it will be on the hook, just so we know exactly how many leaves we need to put on this garland. As we apply the leaves, we're putting them different directions, going kind of back and forth and we're also kind of crumpling them up as we put them on and we're also alternating the leaves. So we've got some oak and some maple all mixed in. Yeah, this is just going to help it look a lot more natural and organic. Now let's make a fluffy pampas grass wreath. All right, we found this fun pampas grass wreath at Target, but look guys, $45 and you know what? We drive past pampas grass on our way home all the time, look at all that. So we're just going to clip some down and do this for basically free. It is for free. As soon as we cut the pampas grass, we want to give it a little spray of hairspray. This is going to keep it from shedding all over your home. And then to make the wreath, we just have a grapevine wreath that was lying around my house not being used and we're just going to use some hot glue and glue each of the little fronds into the grapevine wreath and just kind of alternating from the front to the back center, getting them all the way around the wreath. Yeah. And this is really a simple process and it doesn't take much time at all and it is going to be gorgeous. And yeah, if you don't have this grapevine wreath form, just, you know, I don't even know how much those are, but they can't be very much, but it's got to be $45 from Target. So give this project a whirl. We all know that not all projects go as planned. You know, we really did have high hopes for this witch's cauldron and it just has a sad ending. So let's talk about it. So we're going to use this exercise ball as our form for our cauldron. And then we bought these plaster sheets. They're just like gauze infused with plaster that we are going to apply to our exercise ball, protecting it with a little saran wrap. We did do all the research to this project too, just to make sure we were up on all of the know-hows. So this would work, you guys. We spent so much time on this project. So we're just wetting the gauze and placing it around the ball. And you know, it was kind of time consuming just because you had to wait for each layer to dry, but I mean, it wasn't hard. No, but it was, it was fun too. I was excited about it. Yeah. So we just repeated this over and over and over again. So it had several layers with the gauze, so it was nice and thick and sturdy. And to create the bottom of our cauldron, we are going to use a pool noodle, cut it on an angle to form a circle, and then we're going to just plaster it to the bottom of our cauldron. And once that layer was all dried, then we were able to just turn it around, deflate the exercise ball and remove it from our cauldron. And to create the rim for our cauldron, we're just using pipe insulation. It kind of looks like a pool noodle, but it's got a slit down the whole length of the foam. And so we can just put that on our so far cauldron and then just kind of hook it into place. We're taping it with some duct tape. And then again, we're just going to apply more plaster around that rim, building it up so it's nice and thick. All right. As you can see, we're just working from layer to layer on this project. Once that was all cured, we did do a layer of plaster of Paris. We just mixed some of that up and applied that with a paintbrush all over the entire cauldron. And then when that layer was finished curing, we took a different kind of paintbrush and applied it in just a few little spots here and there with a dabbing motion to create a little bit of added texture to make this look more aged and worn and old. And actually, it made it feel like it was an iron pot, had that texture of iron. Yeah. And then once that was dry, we applied some black spray paint to give it that cauldron look. And ta-da! I mean, look at that. Does that not look like a cauldron? It's looking so awesome. And to create a rusty look on our cauldron, we're just going to sponge on some orange paint. And to seal our cauldron, we're using an exterior clear coat. We know all projects don't go as planned, so please share with us one of your epic fails or one of your funniest fails. We'd love to hear about it. All right. We'll come back to this in a little bit, but for now, let's get back to our fall decor ideas that are not going to fail. Now let's do a fun project with some felted wool balls. We grabbed a bag of these wool balls from the Goodwill several years ago. It was $4. And we've already done a couple projects with them. Last year we made some cute little acorns with them. And so you can really do a lot with these types of balls, different craft projects. What I'm going to do first is just take them off of the string. I'm going to kind of sort them by color to see how many of each I have. And I'm going to play with a couple different patterns over here. I thought it would be fun to kind of recreate a plaid look. And I was going to do some different color balls in between each of those, and I'm not loving it. So I tried just making those plaid lines with the balls. Not loving that. Then I just thought, okay, what about just this cute little pattern, which is fun. Then the pumpkin, I don't know, maybe too cutesy for me. You guys, I just couldn't figure this out. Then you know me, I love my stripes and I love this, but it didn't look very fall to me. So back at it, I'm going to just do all of the colors again. And look, I may as well have just left these all on their string of garland because I'm putting them back in this nice random order. And I think that's just how this is going to work the best for this pillow cover. I'm just going to do this completely random so it gets every single color on there. And I'm using a quilting ruler to mark out the spacing for my lines. Then I'm just going to map out each of these lines with my ruler and a pencil. And the best way I found to get all of these colors and just have it really random and look the best was just putting a pile on the pillow and just pushing them into a line. And it just got the colors on there really randomly. I mean, I can't think of a better word than that, but it just got, you know, you didn't want it to look too perfect or too much of a pattern. So this may really made it look just random, but you have all those colors and it looks great. And it looks so fun and colorful. Okay, it's done. I opened it up and guess what? The glue went all the way through. And I'm having to like pull it apart. See? That's funny. It sticks really good, guys. This whole row. I have to order something in there. Lesson learned. It's going to be okay. The hot glue works great. Now let's make some beautiful fall coasters. I've hung on to these old tiles for years. They were just left over from a couple of projects in our homes. And I'm going to use this silkscreen stencil. And if you've never used one of these before, they are fantastic. It's got a mesh in there. And so when you use them, you don't get a lot of that bleeding that often happens with stencils. It is adhesive and it's reusable. So to apply it, I'm just taking a little bit of metallic gold paint and I put it on a paper plate and then I'm just using this little kind of a squeegee tool. It's soft and flexible and you can just press the paint through the stencil. And you'll see that we get absolutely no bleeding. Once you get it pressed through, you can just use the squeegee to wipe off any excess paint and then just put it back on the paper plate. And now let's lift up the stencil and take a look at that design. Now these tiles are marble and they are very textury and look at how beautiful that turned out. I'm going to choose a different leaf pattern for each tile. And I think this will make really a lovely gift for someone if you're going to a party. I just think it's a great little decor item to have around the home. So to clean up, I just put some water, cool water, in a dish and then I just can kind of rub. I just want to clean out the little mesh areas in the stencil so that it can be reused again and again. It will leave a little staining, but it doesn't harm it at all. And then I'll just shake off the water and lay it down on my countertop to dry. Yeah, and make sure the sticky side is up and then once it's dry, it is a little bit tacky. And then you can put it back on that transfer paper to keep it like new for all your other projects. But look how fun these are. Don't they look really, I feel like they kind of look high end and custom. I really like the look of them. So just to protect that paint a little bit, we're going to apply a satin finish on here just to give them a little bit more durability. And then we added a little bit of like bumpers to the bottom of these so they don't scratch up the coffee table or anything like that. And then they're ready to go. All right, I'm going to have to leave Steph for a bit today. It's my nail appointment day and it's time to get them filled and pretty again. I have always wanted to try making amber glass. So I've picked up this bottle I've actually had on hand, picked up a couple of thrift store jars and we're going to give it a try. So we're going to start with that big clump. Start with some Mod Podge here and I've just got some brown food coloring here and I'm just going to put a few drops in and get this to the color I want it to be. I think I want it to look kind of like chocolate milk. Looks yucky. It doesn't smell really good either. Nope. But you know. Do you want it a little bit darker? Yeah. I think so. All right, now we're going to just pour it into the jars and we're going to do this over a foil lined pan here so we don't have a mess and I'm going to kind of split this between my three vases. Okay, let's see if that's enough. I'm just going to spin it around until I've got the whole inside covered. It does look like chocolate milk, kind of. Shake out anything we can into the bowl and just set it there for a minute. Okay. Okay, I'm just going to let this sit here for a couple hours to drain off any of the Mod Podge we can and then we'll bake it. Okay, we're going to need to bake our Mod Podge and so we're going to set it for 225 degrees for 45 minutes. Okay, we are ready to bake it. So I am just going to kind of wipe off any of that Mod Podge that kind of stuck around the rim and then we'll just place it. Brush that up this time and we'll put it in the oven. And now we're just going to turn off the stove and we're going to let it just cool down on its own before we take them out. Oh, it worked and look how beautiful they are. All right, guys, this is where it all went downhill. Sad story. All right. So my witch cauldron needed a witch. So I was building a witch to go here, had a big stick to go inside it for her to be stirring her brew, place some bricks inside, a bowl on top, dry ice and water so it would bubble and look amazing. And it was going to look amazing. And this is what it looks like. Yeah, the water spilled and now it's broken. Yeah, it was not waterproof. So we did seal the inside as well. So it should have been watertight and everything should have been good to go. But the weight of the bricks, I think, cracked the bottom, which got through to the plaster and made my mess. Dang it. So we've been hanging on to this epic fail for two years because we spent so much time on it and it looks awesome. And we just weren't sure if it was salvageable. But then, you know, after all this time, we're thinking it's time to say goodbye. What do you guys think? Would you try and fix it? Could you fix it? Let us know in the comments. All right, enough of this sad mess. Let's get started on this amazing anthropology dupe. You know, we're always drawn to the looks of these high end stores and this pumpkin candle from Anthropologie was no different, but we didn't want to pay about 50 bucks. So we actually found this glass pumpkin jar at a thrift store for just a couple of dollars. We cleaned it really well and we're going to give it a coat of black paint. It's flat black and it's paint and primer in one. And once the paint is cured, we're just taking some of that antique gold rub and buff and we're just going to apply it to the black pumpkin. And we're going to leave some parts of that black showing through. It's just going to give it a little bit of depth and dimension and it's going to look just like our Anthropologie inspiration piece. Hey, and as you're watching this, be sure to let us know down in the comments which one of these projects is your favorite so far. And once it's all applied, then we're just going to take a soft cloth and give it a buff and bring out that beautiful metallic shine. And then we're just going to make a candle with it. And so I've got some wax melted down. This is just a soy wax that I've melted down. I just did that in the microwave. And then I added to that wax some essential oil. So it has a pumpkin spice scent and we'll just, once we get it filled, we'll just let it cool and then we can enjoy our beautiful pumpkin candle. Do you love the look of high-end decor? Then you're going to love this pumpkin dupe from West Elm. I found these pumpkins while I was thrifting as well, didn't love that brown and kind of olive color. So we're giving them a coat of glossy white paint. And this is paint and primer. Once the paint was cured, we brought them inside and we're going to mask off about an inch. Yeah. We're just going to leave a little bit on the bottom edge. So it's probably about a third of the pumpkin and it doesn't have to be perfect. You know, this is kind of ribbed, but we do want to make sure that this has a nice seal to it. So just apply the tape on there and press it down really well. And we're using that rub and buff again. This is just such a fun product to use. It's super easy to work with. You can use your finger or a paintbrush and we're literally just rubbing this on pumpkin and we're just going to buff off any excess and that's going to give it a nice sheen finish. All right, as we remove the tape, look at that beautiful, elegant, high-end looking pumpkin. Are you ready for another quick and easy decor idea using a vintage find? Okay. I also picked up these three suitcases at a vintage market several years ago. I love using them around my house as a little side table, but I thought, let's just open them up and use them as some fall decor this year. So I'm going to bring in some books to add a little bit of height and we're going to bring in a couple of different pumpkins of varying sizes. And last, I'm just going to bring in some of these fall leaves. It's super easy. Again, I'm not the best with like this whole floral arranging thing, but... I know, she's not very confident with it, but you know what? Once she had it done, I loved it. I thought it was really beautiful. Yeah. So, I mean, I know it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to look organic and natural. Just play around and it's fine. Play around until you like it. Yep. So this was a super easy thing to do and I didn't spend a single penny on this project because I had everything on hand. Alright, we've saved the best for last. This has to be one of my favorite DIYs. Okay, we're going to take just the basic Dollar Tree pumpkin form. I think you can make so many cute things with this and we're going to macrame it. So I've got some macrame cord. You'll also need some cutting dikes and some duct tape. That's the one. Okay. And I'm going to take my cord and I'm going to fold it in half and I'm going to just tie it to the corner brace there of the pumpkin form, just like you're tying your shoe. And you're going to start at the bottom of the wreath form. Yes. And once it's secured to the bottom of the frame, we're going to be making half knots. So you're going to take the cord that is on the right side of the wire and you're going to make a loop over the top of the wire and then you're going to take the cord that's on the left and you're going to bring it over the top of the cord and then underneath the wire and then bring it up through the hole and pull it tight. And we'll just keep repeating this same half knot and as we do, it's just going to spiral around this wire, uh, what do you call that? Rib? Wreath form. Yeah, the wreath form, but it's the rib of the pumpkin. And this knot is called a spin it knot and you'll see that it's just going to spin all the way around the pumpkin. Now let me just tell you a little bit about how to figure out how much cord you need. So what you want to do is to measure the length that you're actually going to do this knot on and you're going to times it by eight and then you'll fold it in half, put, tie it to your section that you're working on. So you'll need to cut a separate cord for each rib that you're working on. We're going to use this same knot for the entire wreath, but I chose to actually add some beads to mine. So to do that, you want to clip up with the cutting dikes about two inches from the top of the wreath form and cut it open and then you're going to thread on the bead and you'll just want to keep an even measurement of how many stitches you do, like five or six and then add a bead and then just space them out evenly on your pumpkin form. Now this part is totally optional. And so once I get the bead on, I will just repeat that same knot. So we'll just do this half knot looping the right side on top of the wire and bringing the left up and underneath and just continue down and repeat that stitch until you finish that whole rib of the pumpkin. So this is totally optional. You can just do the knots and not do the beads. Okay, before you start hooking this wire back together again, you do want to thread another bead on. And I just used a little bit of hot glue to kind of hold it in place for just a minute. And then I'm just taking a piece of duct tape and taping it around the metal wire frame here to secure it and then we will just continue that knot, the knot over the duct tape and you won't even know it's there. I just repeated this step on each of the pumpkin ribs, but I left the outside wire frame of the pumpkin open for now. When you get to the end, you'll just tie a knot around that top edge there where the wires intersect and then I'm just taking a little bit of hot glue and I'm going to just tape it down to the wire form, trim it and then put a little bit of duct tape around that to hold it into position so it doesn't come untied. Now you can see that all of those rib sections of the pumpkin are secured down and taped with the duct tape around the edge. Okay, now we're ready to work the outside edge of our pumpkin frame and you'll just measure again all the way around the distance of the pumpkin frame and times it by eight. This will give you plenty of cord to work with so you don't run out and be short because nothing is worse than having a short piece and you can't blend it in. So we are just going to work the same half knot stitch all the way around the outside edge of the pumpkin. So I'm starting at the top center of the pumpkin and then I'll just work my way all the way around the whole pumpkin frame. Okay, once you make your final knot what you're going to do is take one end of your cord and wrap a piece of masking tape or tape around the end so it doesn't fray and then you're going to hot glue it to the knot that's right next to it. And then you're going to take the long cord that's left and we're going to wrap it around the stem of the pumpkin frame and we're going to just weave it in and out around that stem there until we get all the way up to the very top edge. And then to finish off the top I'm just using some hot glue again. I'm just going to kind of fold it across to cover the very top of the frame. And then just to make sure that that cord doesn't fray I'm going to just wrap it with a piece of tape and then I'm going to fold it to the back side of the frame and then just hot glue it in there. And it won't even show. And finally we're just going to embellish it. I picked up these faux flowers at Hobby Lobby, they're pretty autumn colors and we're just going to attach a couple of the leaves and then just hot glue on three flowers. Hey come see how these look at our homes. In this soft light, troubles fade away with you. No need for words to say your love, a gentle breeze that carries me through. I give up the world, the moon, the sky for you. I'd reach so high across the ocean, I'd soar with pride for you, for you. I, I give up my dreams, my hopes, my view for you. What more could I ever do? I give up the world, the moon, the sky for you, for you. In the silent dawn, you stir from sleep. Sunlight paints your face in golden sheen. Peaceful sea, love that grows like a tender rose. In this soft light, troubles fade away with you. No need for words to say your love, a gentle breeze that carries me through. I give up the world, the moon, the sky for you. I'd reach so high across the ocean, I'd soar with pride for you, for you. I, I give up my dreams, my hopes, my view for you. What more could I ever do? I give up the world, the moon, the sky for you, for you. I, dreams, my hopes, my view for you. What more could I ever do? I give up the world, the moon, the sky for you, for you. I, for you, I, for you, I. Oh, the light, drifting down so soft and slow. Outside my window, watch it go. Oh, the light, like snow. Though the world may seem so still, it's coming in a distant chill. With a memory of winter's past, of the ones I wish would have lasted. Oh, the light, like snow, will tell secrets of long ago of carols sung again. We test all these ideas so you don't have to. Subscribe if you want more projects that work, and some that totally don't. Thanks for watching, and YouTube thinks you'll like this one next.