Fall Decor

It's fall! Finally! Now, if only Texas would get on board and drop below the 90s. We've had a few cold/rainy fronts come through and drop things into the 60s for a few days, but the temps always crank back up into the 80s/90s within a couple days.

With the brief glimpses at fall weather, I decided to get some fall decor up.  I decided it was high time to redo my mantel, and I made a cute fall bunting inspired by Amberly, cutting some triangles out of card stock and attaching them to ribbon using brads.

Obviously with Halloween coming up, I needed some pumpkins to go with my fall decor.  I'm always inspired by non-traditional carvings like these, and after seeing a few awesome sugar skull designs, I knew that I needed to make my own version.

Starting with a gutted pumpkin, I drew starting design in pencil, then got to work carving.

Lino cutters are a great tool to carve designs into just the surface of the pumpkin. I would recommend shelling out the extra $5 or so for the Speedball one. I got the one pictured below from Hobby Lobby because I'd broken a bunch of the blades on my Speedball one, and I ended up just using the blades with the Speedball handle because it was much easier to use.
I also grabbed a multipurpose cutting set from Michaels, and ended up using it quite a bit as well.  I think overall you'd probably be fine buying one set or the other. I used tools from both sets, but this could be accomplished using one or the other.

I went over my pencil marked design with the lino cutter, making changes as I went until I was happy with the final design.

And yeah, maybe make sure not to point the sharp tools at your thumb...and if you're injury-prone like me, maybe also be sure to keep bandaids in your house.  Otherwise you'll slice your thumb open with a lino cutter then wrap it with neosporin, a paper towel, and tape. Klassy.

I also made a cute little vampire toothy one based on an older Martha Stewart tutorial.  Super cute!

Sadly, none of these lasted long enough to get outside and get better pics of! A couple days later, the sugar skull one had already rotted. Sadpants! I'm going to try to carve another before halloween (which is in, uh, two days? It's taken me forever to write this post, I'm a terrible blogger).  Not that anyone besides us would see it, last year we had a sum total of zero trick or treaters!