My practicality and intentionality hooked up with my scissors and away they went.

I’ve said it before, I don’t like fall.  But I am trying really hard to enjoy this new season of life, one that happens to coincide with fall.  And while trying to intentionally enjoy fall, I made some practical steps to do so.  For one, I decorated my house with some easy fall DIYs.  And I’ll let you in on a little secret, this is the first time EVER that I’ve decorated my house for fall.  As in, including childhood.  And I know my mom is reading this and scoffing about all the fall stuff we had–I’m sure we did, Mom–but decorating for fall was never as grand a production as Christmas.  What fall stuff we had was minimal, so if we did decorate, I don’t remember.

Anyway, I looked up a few tutorials through my handy dandy pinterest account and started cutting.

I’ve been wanting to make a book page banner forever.  I almost did a few times for various parties I’ve thrown, but it never actually happened.  So I thought this would be the simplest DIY ever.  And it was.  I made it in the 15 minutes I spent waiting for a friend to pick me up to go shopping.  And that 15 minutes included the print time, coloring the leaves in, taping, and attaching to staircase.  I followed this tutorial almost word for word, and I have a very old, very crappy printer, so I know if mine can do this, yours can too.

I also really wanted to do some garland over my fake fireplace mantel.  So I searched around for some inspiration and found this DIY Leaf Garland tutorial.  I used her Oak Leaf template–I traced it from the computer onto a piece of paper–and cut about 50 leaves while I watched Gilmore Girls.  And I cut out a regular leaf-y shape out of the extra page.  I wanted mine a lot bulkier and layered than the original, so I just cut and cut.  I glued everything with a hot glue gun, and there was absolutely no rhyme or reason to how I made my leaf bunches.

 

When we get back from Philadelphia, I plan on buying some pumpkins and adding it all into the mix.  But for now, I think this will do.

I love it when something so easy, so simply beautiful works out exactly how I want it to.  And I love how these two very tiny projects are actually helping to remind me about fall, and reminding me that I should and need to enjoy this time—the season and the season.