First Day of Fall!!!!

I love fall... the smells, foliage, weather. I could go on and on. If there were a climate that consisted of one month of winter, one month of spring, four months of summer and six months of fall, I'd move there in a heartbeat. I've been slowly updating our home (interior and exterior) for my most beloved season.

When I think of mums, I think fall. I purchased two the other day and will probably end up buying two more because I ended up cutting a lot of the flowers off of them to make mum balls! I came across a DIY project in an old Southern Living. I'm unable to find the image via google, but I did find some similar to the one I saw in SL; the mum balls were shown in a mint julep vase (love)!

And here is mine:

I purchased floral foam balls from Michael's and soaked them for a few hours. Then I went out to my yard and snipped twenty or so mums and cut them stems to 1/3" in length. The article I saved said to simply "insert them into the foam balls". I'm here to tell you that doesn't work... SO I poked the balls with a fork to make holes and inserted the mum tops into the holes.

Helpful hint: Do be careful to not snip any of these furry fellows along with the mums!

I'm very pleased with my mum balls, but I'm even more pleased with my pumpkin topiaries!!!!

I've seen this done many times, but I saw a great image in the October 2010 Country Living (I'm unable to find google images of this one as well) , but I did find some other similar images.

And here are mine:

Wow.. didn't realize how badly we needed a new welcome mat; I might be heading to Home Goods as soon as I hit "Publish Post". Also, picture a glossy black front door. I will have one eventually; it just might be a year... or, God forbid, two. Anyways, back to the pumpkin topiaries: CL recommends securing the pumpkins (although I'm pretty sure that some of these are harvest squashes) with wooden skewers, but I think that will make them rot sooner. I simply stacked mine on top of one another and spritzed them with a bleach-water mixture to make them last longer.

I have other crafty projects I'm working on, but these are the only completed ones for now. On a side note, I'm starting to feel a little like Kip Drordy with no bloggy friends.

I'm not feeling sorry for myself or anything, and I certainly don't need to be really popular in the blog world or anything, but one of the things I was hoping to get out of this blog is for people to give me opinions and comment on things I'm doing around the house- in hopes of avoiding disastrous design decisions I've made in the past. So how does one go about making blog friends? Do I email people? Do I start commenting on others' blog posts? I need to be one of those walk-across-the-room kind of bloggers, but I think right now I'm being one of those wallflower bloggers if such a thing exists.

I hope you've enjoyed your first day of fall and are looking forward to all the beautiful ones to come!

XOXO,

Kelly