My New Fall Wreath!

Ahhh my beautiful front door {sarcastic font} - it desperately needs repainting {and you can see from my paint chips that I've been considering a red - those have been up for over a year. I'm leaning more towards a nice apple green now...} So our front door always is in need of sprucing up until we decide what color to paint it and actually get it painted.

I made a grapevine wreath last year out of some of my neighbors vines that trailed over our side of the fence. As I was trimming them back, I thought I'd keep the vines and make a wreath. I'd never done so before and it was a bit of a learning process.

This year, we made another wreath. Actually, my husband did the same thing I did. He got bored of cutting back the vines and took a break to make a wreath. Gotta love a guy who will stop and be crafty all on his own! After looking at his and looking at mine, I realized they'd look so much better if they were combined to make one beefier wreath. We cut more vines, twisted them all together and stuffed it in the garage to dry out.

Yesterday I dragged it out of the garage and set to making it pretty. I raided my closet and pulled out two tee shirts that I never wear anymore - a brown and an orange one - and set to cutting them into different length strips to make rosettes. Then I raided my very tiny fabric stash and found some nice fall fabric {that you might recognize from my fall tree in a frame project previously} with acorns & pumpkins and made a few rosettes out of that as well.
I knew I wanted to be able to remove the decorations from season to season to re-use later, so they're actually attached with some left over floral wire I had laying around. They're not on there super sturdy, so I'll have to play with it more and see if I can't get them on just a bit tighter - they're a little loosey goosey right now.

Next I found some nice fall paper {which, again, you might recognize from my Thanksgiving banner from last year} and cut out some triangles with my Cricut. I hot glued them to a piece of twine and tied it on the branches.

Total cost? Free. My favorite amount.

xoxo, Sarah

I'm linking this project up to:

Tatertots & Jello's Weekend Wrapup

Be Different...Act Normal's Show and Tell Saturday

Scatter Girls: Fall Porch Linky Party

Happily Ever After

This is an oldie but a goodie. I made this frame after being inspired by Lisa at Moore Minutes (inspiration here). I took a plain dollar store pine frame and sprayed it with Oil Rubbed Bronze. After that dried, I went over it in plain white. I sanded the edges (perhaps a bit early, my sanding is some what smudgy, but I like the way it looks). I removed the glass and covered the back with scrapbook paper.

I had just purchased my Cricut and all I had was the George & Basic Shapes cartridge, but it was perfect for this craft. I cut a tag at 2 1/2" on some pale peach cardstock and then tea-stained it a deeper color. Once that was completely dry, I carefully taped the tag on a piece of printer paper and ran it through my printer (the font is Larger Mime, found free here).

Once that was finished, I measured out my brown ribbon and fiddled with the placing of the tag. As you can see, the tag itself isn't centered, but the tag + ribbon is. Then I dug through my button stash and found several cute little buttons that matched the colors in the scrapbook paper and added those to the corner of the tag to pull it all together.

The frame sits on a faux shuttered window in our master bedroom and when life starts to get really hard, I look at that frame and remind myself that it could be a lot worse.

xoxo, Sarah

Scrappin' Saturday

Here's a layout I made recently. I actually made eight copies of this layout; I'm attending a scrap-swap at the end of the month. As you can see, I haven't added photos yet, but I have quite a few picked out. Some of Ben's favorite things that I'll be documenting are: trucks, dip (like ranch for his nuggets), grapes, his sand & water table, and Elmo.


Aside from the ribbon and the accent pieces, I used my Cricut entirely for this craft. Using my SCAL2 software, I cut the bracket frame journaling tags (free .svg file found here). I also used SCAL2 for the lettering, using sf Natalie font (found free here ).

I did a three part layer on the ribbon. The base ribbon is a stretchy blue gingham ruffle ribbon that I centered a plain green grosgrain ribbon on top of and then a sunny yellow rickrack ribbon on top of that. I glue dotted each layer together and cross stapled at the ends.

I found these fun ribbon embellished paperclips in the scrapbook accessories aisle at Hobby Lobby. I loved how they picked up on the polka dot theme of the background paper and tied in to the whole color scheme.

The paper mats are actually from way outside the scrapbook aisles. As I was making my layouts, I realized I didn't have enough of any one color card stock to make all the mats for eight layouts. I started doing multi color - I had enough card stock to do each of the five mats per layout a different color.... I just didn't like the way it looked. By the time I changed my mind, Hobby Lobby was closed but I was too impatient to wait. I went to Target and wasn't impressed with their card stock options. I was inspired to match the mats to the lettering background - which happened to look like kraft paper (it's actually card stock). Well, Target ended up being sold out of their rolls of kraft paper. I thought "lunch bags!" and off I went only to discover Target's lunch bags are not, in fact, brown - they're blue & red. As I was headed dejectedly away, a stack of yard leaf bags caught my eye....

I brought them home, trimmed 'em to size and they look perfect.

xoxo, Sarah