Fall Mantle

Happy fall ya'll! I hope you are all enjoying the cooler weather and changing colors. I love so many things about fall! The cool brisk air, a warm cup of cocoa, the changing colors and falling leaves, football season and of course another opportunity to change up the decor a little bit.

Although we hadn't planned on posting anymore until our "real" blog is officially ready to be unveiled, I just had to give you a little sneak peak at what I've been up to around here.

Enter my fall mantle.

Isn't the chalkboard printable fabulous? This beauty is from one of my very favorite sources, the Caravan Shoppe. It's part of a Thanksgiving set called 'All Chalked Up'. This set comes with everything you need to decorate your home and host a stylish Thanksgiving fete. It comes with 3 large quote posters, a large 'Gobble, Gobble Turkey' poster, printable placemats and circle art that could be used for napkin adorning, stickers for take home boxes or anything else your heart desires. It's adorable and I had to have it. The entire set costs $5 and the digital file is sent to your email address immediately after purchasing. Purchase once and print off as many times as you want. Although there are many free printables available on the internet and all over Pinterest, with items from the Caravan Shoppe I know the quality is incredible and the file size is specially made for printing extra large prints so I won't have to worry about quality at that size. Plus, I just love their style! I can spend hours perusing Pinterest for just the right fall print or I can hop on over to The Caravan Shoppe and likely find just what I'm looking for in the click of a button. The print above is the medium size engineer print that I previously posted about here. I printed it at Staples for $3.69 and placed it in one of my favorite thrift store frames (Isn't she a beauty too? For $15.00 she was all mine. After a little happy dance in the aisle). Look for a future post on all the in's and out's of engineer prints coming soon.

Here's a little close up of this not so little beauty.

Swoon.

Sigh.

Moving on.......

Here is a closer look of my fall mantle.

You may notice several items from my Halloween decor post here making a reappearance in my fall mantle. The yarn bottles, wrapped books and white vase are all being re-purposed for this vignette. That's what we're all about here at Like Mother Like Daughter Blog. We believe that good design doesn't have to be expensive. Shopping your own home, re-purposing items from other rooms and carefully selecting thrift store finds can achieve a designer look for a fraction of the cost! Look for a future post on how to decorate a mantle or side table with lots of tips on how to achieve balance and visual interest. For today I will just give you the basics of what I did for this particular mantle. First off,  start out with something that you love....your focal point. You will build your mantle around this key item. For me it was obviously the 'Give Thanks' print. Next I began to place other items in fall colors that complimented one other. I used items of varying heights to create balance. 

Next to the yarn covered wine bottles is a small wooden bowl I found at a thrift store. I dry brushed it with a mustard yellow craft paint and lightly sanded in some places for that chippy, distressed look.

In the center of the mantle are my little thrift store books covered with painters paper. For my fall mantle I changed them up a little by wrapping with twine and threading a few tares of wheat through the twine. Nested on top and to the side of the books are one of my favorite thrift store finds of the month. I picked up these little babies for $.65 each. I adore them. They make me giddy.

The right side of the mantle displays a white vase filled with small sticks and fall leaves. I pulled these from my yard but I will be honest, they have to be changed about every 3-5 days or they start looking a little........well........dead. I have plenty of leaves and branches in my yard that need to be trimmed so I will be supplied throughout the fall, but you may want to take the easy route and go fake. Shhh! Don't tell the decor police that I'm encouraging fake foliage. I hear it's a cardinal sin, but I'm a rebel like that.

Once all my larger items were in place I filled in the gaps with natural elements and textures. With the exception of the pine cone from my yard and the one squash in the last photo, all the other small elements were purchased together in a wicker cornucopia from a thrift store. I knew I likely wouldn't use the cornucopia but $1.50 for all the dried fall accents was a deal I couldn't pass up. I seem to have a lot of those deals I can't pass up don't I? Don't answer that. It was a rhetorical question. 

One last look.

Thanks for stopping by! 

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Welcome to my "Boo"tiful home

Hello new friends! Welcome to our blog before our blog. Huh? What? Let me explain. My daughter Brianna and I are joining together with our combined love of DIY and decor with our cheap thrifty nature. We would love to share with you our ideas and tips for beautifying a home on a budget. While our "real" blog is in the design stages (with someone who actually knows what they are doing) we thought we'd create a space where we can preview a bit of what our blog content will be.

Today I would like to welcome you into my spooky home. 

Sofa Table Display

Formal Living Room Mantle

I knew I didn't want to spend a lot of money on Halloween decorations so I tried as much as possible to use what I already had on hand. Shopping your own home is one of the best ways to decorate on a budget. Take a walk around your home looking for things that can take on new life as part of a display, draped with a little webbing or black mesh, or even spray painted (as long as it will still work in its usual spot once painted).

Double Double print from It's Always Autumn via Eighteen25

I love this print from It's Always Autumn originally posted over at eighteen25 (check it out at here). I printed this at my local Staples Copy & Print center for $1.69. Yes. One dollar and sixty-nine whopping cents. Now that's frugal decor baby. I had this printed as an "Engineer Print" and if you have been living under a rock and don't know about Engineer Prints let me give you the down low. They are cheap.....wait, did I already mention that? Okay, moving on. They are over-sized prints that are printed in black and white only and on a thin paper (think blueprint thickness). The print above is the smallest size available at Staples and it is 18"x24" (the largest is 36"x48"  for only $6.59!!!).

For the middle section of my mantle I begged asked around for cool bottles from friends who drink alcohol and collected some pretty cool ones! For free!!! I picked up 3 small childrens books at DI (local thrift store) and covered them with painters paper. I added a small amount of spanish moss from a bag I purchased at the dollar store and a $.97 skull from Walmart to the top. The frame was one I already had on hand (LOVE it!!! A great Ross purchase.) and for the inside of the frame I printed clip art from the amazing Graphics Fairy (http://thegraphicsfairy.com). If you are not familiar with the Graphics Fairy, grab a snuggly blanket, curl up on the couch and tell your family you'll see them in a few hours. There's SO much there to print for....you guessed it.....FREE!!!!! 

There's not too much to say about the right side of the mantle. The white vase is part of my every day decor and I filled it with small branches from my backyard that I sprayed with black spray paint. The lantern matches the one on the opposite side of my mantle. They were both purchased at a thrift store for $1 each. They are actually citronella lanterns but when I saw them I knew they would be fun decor in addition to their function fighting mosquitoes. I love it when that happens! :) The black mesh used throughout my decor is from the dollar store (this one from Dollar Tree). The dollar store is a great resource for decorations. Although some decorations are cheap and might look like they come from the dollar store, others like this mesh are just as great as similar ones sold elsewhere for 3 times as much! Score one for us cheapskates!

Now moving on to my tablescape......

I started off my sofa table by draping it with my dollar store mesh (does anyone know what this stuff is really called??? Maybe I should actually read the package next time. Novel idea.). Then I used my usual trick of shopping my house. Let's take a closer look.....

The metal and glass orb decoration (yes, that's the official name. as official as 'black mesh'. yeah.) always sits on this table. I simply added a few black centipedes from the dollar store woven through the wooden balls that sit inside and a dollar store raven to the top. The concrete looking planter/urn was moved from elsewhere in the house and filled with more Spanish moss (still using the same bag) from the dollar store and topped with a raven and a few spiders and bugs. Small tip when filling items like the urn above: Instead of filling from top to bottom with the moss, conserve moss (or other filler) by wadding up a piece of newspaper or similar item and placing it in the bottom of the urn. That way you will only add enough moss to the top to cover the newspaper ball, using far less than you would have. 

I printed the two bottle labels at home using my printer. There are many, many fabulous resources online. Search Google images for Halloween labels and you will find more than you know what to do with. The two I used here were found here and here. Next I filled a Walmart glass jar that I already had (big surprise!) with more Spanish moss and skeleton heads (12 pk $2.97 at Walmart), and placed a dollar store glittered pumpkin on top of a candlestick I already had (are you sensing a theme here?).

Next I printed Book covers and spines that I found at Tip Junkie onto painters paper. You know the stuff....it comes on a long roll and you spread it out when painting trim to protect other surfaces. Clear as mud? Anyway, I cut it to fit in my printer and printed the book covers and spines and lightly taped them to books I already have in our family collection. These covers will come off and I will put the books back on our shelf after Halloween. If you wanted to leave your books covered for use year after year, you could find books at garage sales of thrift stores for around a dollar. The picture on the far right of my tablescape was printed from the internet. I cannot for the life of me find the source anywhere. Any. where. If anyone can give credit to the proper source please let me know. The photo is sitting in a matting and frame I got for $1.50 at DI.

If you're still with me you're a trooper! Moving on to the last spot....my formal living room mantle:

The lighting is horrible in my formal living room so forgive the poor photos. You'll get the idea though. As you may have guessed, I started with dollar store 'black mesh', shopped my house for some decor and accessorized with a few dollar store and thrift store finds. Cuz that's how I roll. 

More fun bottles! The one to the left was $.75 at DI, the one in the middle was donated to my cause from friends and the one to the right is from.....wait for it.....wait for it.....yep, you guessed it, my home! You're getting good at this! Yep, it's bubble bath. I opened the bathroom cabinet and there it was.....all green and looking like armadillo bile. Like I would know. But it works for me. Label here. 

For fear of sounding like a broken record let's make this brief: White dish shopped from elsewhere in my home (originally from DI $2), same $1 bag of Spanish moss used to fill only the top part of the dish, yet another raven (love them). Skull $.97 from Walmart.

Middle of mantle: Books from my home, round thrift store frame $1, bat printed from The Graphics Fairy here, dollar store glitter pumpkin.

Wine bottle covered in twine (gift from my lovely and talented daughter Brittany), thrift store bottle $1 (I think I may have squealed out loud when I found this in DI. maybe.) and a printable from Lil' Luna with a skull image originally from none other than The Graphics Fairy, which was of course framed with a frame from elsewhere in my house. The print will be switched back out after Halloween and a Thanksgiving print will take it's place. I'm sure I'll share that one too so be sure to check back with us soon!

One last little corner of my home......

A broken branch painted black is a perfect place for my friends the ravens to perch.

And lastly, let's take a look at my front door (that seriously needs to be sanded and stained again)......

A dollar store creepy door knocker adds an spooky touch to my otherwise tame front porch.

Whew! Thanks for sticking with me. I hope it was helpful and gave you a little inspiration to have a "boo"tiful home of your own this Halloween! Check back with us soon for more great decor and DIY ideas and don't forget to come back so you can link up to our "real" blog once it's up and going! 

Have a "spook"tacular Halloween!