Autumn Decorations – Outdoor Displays and Fall Foliage
Learn how to make easy affordable autumn decorations with fall foliage and botanicals in this Pottery Barn video:
1. Create a Beautiful Outdoor Display: If you take walks through the woods during the fall, collect items along the way such as nuts, pine cones, nests and bird feathers. These finds can be put on display near an entry by hanging glass jars from a row of hooks and using them to fill or even top the jars. Kids love this sort of collecting, and it’s a fun and inexpensive way to decorate for the season at hand.
2. Decorate with Autumn Foliage: Autumn leaves, both faux and real, make for beautiful seasonal decorating. Try filling a galvanized barrel with branches of faux leaves and drape a garland between the barrel’s handles. As a final step, mix in real lichen-encrusted branches and cuttings of fall foliage.
3. Fill Your Outdoor Lanterns: Collect botanicals such as dry polypore mushrooms and place bunches of them in a lantern around the base of a pillar candle.
4. Writing with Wire: To write words, using wire, begin with a spool of annealed iron wire, needle nose pliers, and a pair of cloth or leather work gloves. The gloves are important because annealed iron wire is oiled to prevent rust, and the gloves will help remove the oil from the wire as it is unwound.
- Once you have a workable length or wire, snip off, and while still wearing your gloves, straighten and lean the wire. Needle nose pliers will allow you to grasp and work the wire using different widths of the pliers’ tapered nose.
- You’ll want to begin bending and working the wire without the gloves. Make your first bend, using the pliers, and then begin working curves into the wire to form letters. The cursive style of writing is easiest to manage and makes for a certain fluidity in the final product. When you need a sharp bend in the wire to form a letter, the narrow tips of the pliers works really well. Simpler, right angle sort of bends are best made with the wide base of the pliers.
- Continue to work your way through the letters of the word you want to write and keep finessing and smoothing until you’re satisfied with the legibility and style of the word.
- If your word is a greeting such as “Welcome”, place it in the entry, hanging from a row of hooks, so it will be the first thing guests see when they arrive.
