Autumn and Thanksgiving

Easy Fall Signs Using Supplies from the Dollar Store 

The fall season brings with it a reminder that winter is coming. However, instead of focusing on the long winter ahead of us, let’s live in the moment. For us crafters, autumn is a time to incorporate all the colours of the season in our home decor.

To that end, try your hand at making these easy fall signs.

Three Pumpkins

Materials Used

• Three wood pumpkins (Dollarama)
• 2 sets mini wood letters (Dollarama)
• metallic paints in gold, brown and green (Dollarama)
• Leaf stickers
• clear tape (on hand)
• wood glue (on hand or Dollar Tree)
• 3 tumbling tower blocks (Dollar Tree)

I started with these three small pumpkin plaques from Dollarama; one tall and two short. I simply turned them over and worked with the blank canvas the backs provided.

 

 

I had recently found some metallic paints at Dollarama and thought this would be the perfect time to use them. Metallic gold was used to paint the main part of the pumpkins. It looks orange in the light these pictures were taken in but, as you’ll see in the last picture, it is indeed gold.  Each pumpkin took about three coats of acrylic paint to cover sufficiently.

 

 

The brown metallic paint was perfect for the pumpkin stems.

After my pumpkins were painted and dry, I moved on to decorating them.

 

 

Next I chose some small wood letters to spell “Thankful,” “Grateful,” “Blessed” for each of the three pumpkins.

 

Obviously, these tiny letters could be a pain to paint so I hit on the idea of adhering them to the sticky side of some clear tape to hold them in place. I kept the tip of one finger on the edge of the tape while I painted.

 

 

I used the green metallic paint to paint each set of letters.

 

 

After the paint was dry, I employed the same tape to help me line up the words on the pumpkins so they’d be relatively straight. I used wood glue to attach the letters to the pumpkins.

 

 

This tape removes easily. I was a bit heavy-handed with the wood glue, but it dried clear.

 

 

I found a sheet of pop-up fall leaf stickers at Dollar Tree. The first sticker had two leaves attached, so I carried on using two leaves on each of the other two pumpkins as well.

 

 

I thought the bottom of the pumpkins was looking a bit bare, so I used some fall-themed rub-on transfers to balance out the over-all look.

 

 

These pumpkins are meant to stand up but the bases are narrow, so I added a tumbling tower block to the back of each pumpkin for additional support.

 

The finished pumpkins were the first autumn decorations I added to my mantle. I’m pleased with the way they turned out.

Thankful Sign Re-Make

Supplies Used

• Thankful sign
• Beige scrapbook paper
• small screwdriver
• hot glue
• large and small sunflower embellishments

 

 

I liked the sunflowers backing on this sign but thought they were a bit overpowering and took away from the sentiment.

 

 

I mistakenly thought that the staples holding the back onto this sign would be easy to remove. They weren’t. I ended up using a small flat-head screwdriver to pry the backing away from them and gave up on trying to remove the staples altogether. In the end, leaving the staples in didn’t make a difference to the finished project.

 

 

I tried different colours for the background but ended up with this beige piece, cut to fit the backing of the sign.

 

 

I used a glue stick to attach the paper to the sign backing and reattached the backing to the sign using hot glue.

 

 

I had some paper sunflowers in my stash.  These paper flowers came on wire stems, but they were easy to pull off. I hot glued two of the larger ones at the top, centre of my sign.

 

 

I placed a small sunflower on each corner of the sign and glued the remainder of the small ones onto the backing paper.

 

 

Hot glue was used to attach a piece of faux leather to the back of the sign to use as a hanger and trimmed the excess. I think this faux leather strip came off of a candle I bought a long time ago. Any type of hanger will do but I thought the brown faux leather complemented this sign perfectly.

 

 

After gluing on the hanger, I used a piece of duct tape over top of the glued ends for extra strength.

 

 

Now the sentiment on this sign stands out as it should and the sunflowers add needed colour without overwhelming this important reminder to be thankful. 

 

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