Fall Decorate with Me | Cozy Vintage Fall Decor & DIY's!

It's the coziest, gloomiest day. The first day that really feels like fall here. While we have this wonderful weather, I'm going to finish decorating the house for fall. Lots and lots of fall foliage that we're going to be working in here. These garlands here are from at home. I actually got these in spring, so you'll probably recognize them from the spring video, but I love the leaf shape and these little blooms that are on the flowers. I feel like work perfect for fall. I decided that we're going to use them. This is adding our pop of green, the stuff that's not quite changed over for fall yet, and mixing in the yellows and the oranges along with that. A lot of these pumpkins and things I had from last year or the previous couple of years, I actually got a couple of bags of these from Walmart a couple of years ago. I went in with a dark wax and just kind of dirtied them up to make them look a little bit more aged and not so bright in color, so that's a good tip. I found these at an estate sale last week for $2 each, so I got several of those. Yeah, gourds, things like that that I've just had. I ran into at home this year, which I have to tell you, at home can be kind of hit or miss, but I do find things there, so I always think it's worth going and checking. This year I got these stems, which have these kind of, again, like aged looking berries on them. I thought these were pretty good, and so I bought several of these. I also have these, which I have had for maybe two years now from Michael's. They actually come like this in a whole bunch, but I use them in a garland and cut little stems off to tuck them into my garland, so I have just like a bunch of these little things, which is totally fine. We can work with it. We can make little arrangements with them. I have a ton of them. These are hazelnut. It's called contorted hazelnut, I believe, and these are from Trader Joe's. I actually found these several months ago, and I thought they were so cool. They'll be great for Halloween. That was kind of my initial thought, but I actually really like to use stuff like this for fall as well, so we've got those. I also, from at home, I got this wreath that has the pears on it, which I thought was really cute. I don't think I'm going to hang this on the door. It's a little too sparse for that, but I do think maybe for the china cabinet or something, that could be really cute, or just on a mirror. Of lots of vintage goodies that I can pair along with it. I've got my bird cages. Those are perfect for fall as well, and yeah, we're going to get started. The idea behind this design is I want it to feel very in line with early fall, which is what we're kind of into right now, where we're incorporating a lot of this green and also some bare branches and also some kind of muted tones, muted oranges, things like that to kind of represent what the turning of the season looks like in a mantlescape, so that was kind of my inspiration for this. I love using these twigs. They kind of have this like spindly look about them, and I really wanted to create something that wasn't completely symmetrical, so I worked this side up and then worked the other side down the mantle a little bit lower just to give it a little bit more interest. I will mention that this is our tv above the mantle. It's not a painting. We created a frame for it a couple of years ago, for those of you that don't know, and so I try not to put too many things like in front of the tv to obstruct the view, but I did work this up. I like pushed the limits a little bit with this one, but I knew it was only going to be up for a couple of weeks, so I think it was totally worth it. So these are limelight hydrangeas. They are sun loving. They're the only hydrangeas that I have ever been able to keep alive, and we planted a whole hedge of them behind the pool two years ago, so I hear that year three is the year that they leap, so I'm really looking forward to that. They will grow really big and have a ton of blooms, which I thought would be really beautiful behind the pool. The only issue that I have with this area is, as you can see, we have a lot of vines. I don't mind the grape vines, which you can see in this clip, but the rest of the fence is all covered in trumpet vine, and trumpet vine is a nuisance of a vine. It spreads so aggressively, and there's so much on our property and then also neighboring properties that I don't know if we'll ever be able to get rid of it, but yeah, that's kind of been my big thing with trying to keep the landscaping under control in the hedge area. Anyway, this is my PSA. Do not plant trumpet vine. Do not play yourself or your neighbors with trumpet vine. Okay, moving on to the arrangement. I'm using a cup of water. Don't fill it that full, actually. That was way, way too full. I think probably maybe a quarter of the way in that cup would have been good. You just want to put a little bit of water in the bottom so that it keeps the hydrangeas alive. Once it runs out of water, just don't replace it. You can leave it just as is, and they will dry out beautifully. They will kind of de-saturate and color a little bit over time. Also, if you can wait to clip them, they, in the kind of early fall months, will turn to a reddish color. They're beautiful, but I've kept them for years. I've also followed the advice to spray them with hairspray after they dry a little bit so that they don't break apart as much. So anyway, highly recommend limelight hydrangeas. They're beautiful. Okay, so I'm getting ready to frame all of these prints, and originally I got the dog and the equestrian print, one of them to stack over this frame because I have those stacked frames in the living room, and I thought I was going to use this equestrian one, and while I do think some of the tones here work together, I don't like it paired with this one quite as much as I like it with the dog, and I could tell that I was probably going to like this a little bit more, but what I wasn't expecting was to like this pairing, which I don't have a place, I don't think, to pair these, but these are really pretty together with the red in his jacket matching kind of the reds throughout this. The tones just work really nicely together. I may have to keep that in mind for next year when I'm decorating for fall. A couple of years ago, I gave this frame a little makeover and painted the inner kind of piece of this black and rub and buffed the rest, which was no longer loving it, so I decided to do what I call a little bit of chaos DIYing. Honestly, this whole video is filled with chaos DIYing, but took a bit of rub and buff, covered up the black, and then went back in with some dark aging wax, and there, I mean, it's foolproof, like you just kind of throw it all on there, and it gave it a little upgrade, made it look a little bit better, and then the other thing is mod podging your prints. So I always order the Giclee prints on fine art paper from Impix. I find that they can get kind of marked up over time, and so doing this method where you use the mod podge on it acts as a protectant and also makes it look more like a realistic painting. So I highly recommend, if you haven't tried this, do it. Just make sure there's no globs or air bubbles left because you will be able to see that once it dries. So I wanted to share something with you guys. As most of you know, we recently lost our dog Salem, and we just miss him dearly. When I shared about this on Instagram, I had a follower reach out and say that she wanted to paint him for us, which was just the kindest gift I have ever received. I mean, this is the most beautiful painting, and she just captured him so well. He's got this little spot on his nose that was, you know, just like all of the details, like the details of him, his little teeth sticking out like that. She just captured his spirit so well, and it looks exactly like him. So she does pet portraits, but she does more than just pet portraits. She does commissioned paintings of all kinds, and I'm going to link all of her information below. Her name is Heather over at Shadowbrook Studio, and she offered to do this just out of the kindness of her own heart. We didn't have an agreement that I was going to share it or anything like that. She just truly is a sweet, sweet soul, and this is so incredibly special to us. So like I said, I'm going to link her information down below in case you're looking to get a commissioned painting done, or honestly, even if you just want to go follow her and show her some support, I know that it would mean the world to her. And the frame that I used, I actually got from Amazon, if you can believe it. I thought it was really nice, looked like an antique frame. I did have to rip the backing off, so I'm waiting for some special like frame tape to come in, and we're going to seal up the back, and then we will find a spot for him. But this is just such a special and beautiful gift that I don't have the words to express my appreciation for. So we've got this Victrola record player. It's a newer version. We probably got it like 10-ish years ago. I love having this out. We love playing records. But this also has Bluetooth, so that's kind of the nice thing about it being like a modern piece. But I don't love the color of it. It's just too orangey. So I like warm woods, but I need them to be deep. So I'm going to gel stain this. I've never used this method before, but I have a few things that I would like to do this on. So I feel like this will be a good small project to try it out with. But you can apply this gel stain over a pre-existing finish without sanding all the way down from what I have read. So we're going to give it a try. I'm going to do a quick like clean of it, scuff sand just to kind of give it something to grip onto. It's pretty small, so I don't think it's going to take us too terribly long to get this done. So yeah, let's hope that this turns out the way that I want it to. It may need more than one coat. We'll see. I'm going to start with one, but I have a feeling it might take two. So let's give it a try. So this project was very much a trust the process kind of project. I lost my trust about halfway through. So there's some missing footage, but I'm going to fill you in on what happened. So I'm not actually sure if this is real wood. I assume it is, but I don't know what kind of coating they put on the top of it. And I think it probably could have used a bit more roughing up because the stain wasn't wanting to stick to it all that well. And the thing about gel stain is it doesn't soak into the wood. Unless you do sand it down all the way, it will soak into the wood grain. But in this case, it's not going to soak all the way down into the wood grain. And so it can look streaky. You can tell that the finish is sitting on top. You can kind of see right here. You're not supposed to apply a second coat right away like I'm doing here, but I have used the product enough to know kind of how to manipulate it. So I did like a really quick second coat in some spots, not all. And then I did like an official second coat the next day. But here's about where I lost all trust. This was looking terrible and so streaky. And then the next day, I decided, you know what, we're going to just try. We're going to see what a second coat does. And it actually turned out. So I never got around to doing the inside of it. There was just too much to work around. I may go back and do that. I may not. A few days later, I applied a top coat on it. And I will say I tried this on some vintage tabletops in the same fashion where I didn't sand it all the way down, but because the finish was older and had worn down on its own more over time, it definitely worked much better in that case. As I'm finishing up the last couple of minutes here, I just wanted to tell you, thank you for hanging out with me today. I hope that you enjoyed today's video. I will be back very soon with a cozy fall kitchen decorate with me. So be sure to subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you guys next time.