My Front Porch – Fall Style

How was your weekend?  I had a great weekend.  It started out by getting up early Saturday morning and doing what I do every week.  I go and do Bountiful Baskets.  It is something that I enjoy, even if I don’t get to sleep in on Saturday mornings.  Then it was followed up by having the opportunity to learn and listen to the Apostles and Prophet from our church.  Every six months we have the chance to listen to General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and I look forward to it every April and October.  So my weekend was lovely staying home, spending time with my family and enjoyed listening and watching General Conference.  I hope your weekend was wonderful as well.
Do you decorate your front porch for the seasons or holidays?  My husband and I have been married for just over 11 years, and I’ve probably decorated our porch about half as many years as we’ve been married.  This is the first time I’ve done it in the three years that we’ve been living in this house, and I’m so excited about it!
This whole idea came about because I found these cute arrows at The Wood Connection.  They have them decorated really cute for Halloween, but I decided to go with a fall theme that I could leave out during September, October, and November.

I had so much fun making these!  It was one of those projects that I could see in my head, and it was coming together just how I pictured it.  To do the signs, I started by painting them all the colors that I wanted them, and then I used my Cricut to cut some contact paper to make my stencils.  (NOTE: I wouldn’t recommend using contact paper. If I did it again, I’d use vinyl, because it doesn’t leave a sticky residue on the wood when you peel it off.)  Once I had my stencils on, I just painted them.  I painted them all a cream color for the words, but decided that the cream color was too close to the gold color I used and didn’t think it would be very visible, so I went over that one again with brown.  Then I distressed them all. After I had all the signs done, I used wood glue to glue them to my stake.  I hope it holds up well being outside.

We had to go on a little bit of a hunt to find a straw bail, but now we know where to find them!  I wouldn’t recommend putting it inside your car to haul it home tho. 🙂  I never did see how messy the car was, because we got home and my sweet husband took the straw out of the car and then took the car to vacuum it out!

The corn stalks are from our garden, and we also grew all of the pumpkins in our garden.  This was the first year that we planted a garden, and we were pretty excited with how well it did.

Here is a closer look at the distressing, ribbons and rafia on the arrows.  “Corn Patch” was the one that has two colors for the letters and I think it adds so much when it is distressed.

I used my electric sander for the distressing.  It worked great, but I got a little carried away on one and had to repaint and resand.  It turned out alright, but I wish I just wouldn’t have messed it up in the first place.   Oh well.

I’m excited to have this fun fall display greet anyone who comes to our home (anyone but solicitors 😉 ), and it makes me excited to see it anytime I go in or out of the front door. 🙂  I’d love to see what your front porch looks like, is it all decorated for Halloween, or do you stick with fall decor.  Feel free to leave a link in the comments, or post a picture or your porch on The Happy Scraps FB page.