Fall Entry and Mantel

Summer is officially boxed up here.  We have stepped back from the blues and tans and have replaced them with golds, reds, and browns.  Such warm and lovely tones.

So welcome friends, welcome to fall:

 Tis the season to curl up in front of a warm, toasty fire:

Warm colors, cozy fires, pine cones, cinnamon, apples, big piles of leaves, family get togethers..... these are the things I most love about fall.  What are your favorite fall things?

Linking up with:  Centsational Girl

Brightening Up

I don't know about where you live, but up until today the weather has been cloudy, drippy and dreary.  So I decided to add a little sunshine to my front entry.

Here is the before, in all it's new spring wreath and dirty glass door glory:

I purchased this chair from Sam's Club (I was too impatient to find one on Craig's list, thrift store, or garage sale).

Using some bright yellow spray paint, I spruced that baby right up for a fabulous pop of color.

Little Smiley, decided she needed a chair too, so she pulled an old rusty one (given to us about 10 years ago by our sweet elderly neighbor at the time).

The branches I had picked up off the ground one morning while walking my dog ~ who by the way likes to hang out in the cabinet I guess.

I couldn't find her one day and went to go shut the cabinet door (although they are gettting better, no one in my house seems to think it is necessary to fully shut all of our cabinet doors) and someone popped up.

Anyway, Hubby was attempting to clean out our garage and was tired of moving my lovely branches from point A to point B and back again.  So I propped them up in a planter, via some landscaping bricks,  stole some lava rock from around the house and filled it up.

Works for me, at least for a couple of weeks until I'm ready to do some flower planting!

Ahhh..... much better!

And of course, the sun is out and shining today :)

Today's Creative Blog

Sarah’s Home May’d spray paint linky party

81. A first Birthday 

82. Celebrating an accomplishment 

83. A clean house 

84. Brighter colors 

85. Laughing with my in-laws 

86. My family who knows how to rally together 

87. My beautiful 10 year old daughter 

88. My Amazing husband 

89. Warm water, the smell of chlorine and smiles at the indoor pool 

90. My mom

Monogram Rug

I found this picture of an entryway, last year in I think a special edition Better Homes and Gardens magazine (paging through while Sassy was in her gymnastics class):

Lucky for me that I had my camera with so I could take a picture of the picture (I'm sure no one though I was crazy)  since I couldn't steal it from the gymnastics center.

I loved the colors and all of the monograms, but I really loved the rug (and the pots ~ just might have to make those too☺).

and thought to myself, "EASY! I can do that!"

Now a year later, I am finally getting around to monogramming a rug!

Here's how I did it:

~ I purchased an inexpensive rug from Ikea ~ $7.99 to be exact (the website says $8.99, but I swear I only paid $7.99). 

~ Found a font from the computer that I liked and printed off a huge "C"  (my son says it stands for Christmas ☺).  Then I cut it out, outside of the line, to make it a bit bigger.
~ I decided to paint in my monogram and not spray paint around it as shown in the magazine.  I also decided to add a border.

At first I was going to make it like this one from Ballard Designs:

So I taped off my rug:

But, I decided I liked how it looked with the border in farther (like where the tape is) in, so I re-taped my rug:

I painted the border with red acrylic paint (same color I used to paint my chalkboard).  Since there was so much texture in the rug I did more of a pounding motion with my paintbrush as opposed to a sweeping motion.

When that part was painted, I traced my "C" in the center of the rug, then filled that in with paint.

Slowly peeled off the tape ~ praying for no bleeding ☺ and VOILA:

A beautiful monogrammed rug!

The next morning (since it was 11:30 and dark out) I sprayed the rug with a clear spray paint to seal it and help increase the durability.

Here's what it looks like outside in the entry:

I'll be linking up here this week:

Polly Want a Crafter?

 Today's Creative Blog