Burlap Swag Curtains

  I'd been thinking about doing burlap curtains for awhile when I found 1 and 1/2 rolls of gardening burlap at a yard sale - I paid $1.00 for them (happy dance) it normally sells for around $12 at Home Depot. I'd come across this tutorial for Burlap Swag Curtain on the blog Town and County Living and loved the way they looked and wanted to copy it in my Sunroom.

  Here is what it looked like before - it just needed something to finish it up!

  The roll of burlap was 3 feet wide by 24 feet long. My curtains needed to be 18 feet long - plus a bit more so the curtains had some swag to them.

  It was a long piece of cloth. Andrew mounted the curtain rod for me (I reused one I already had, just spray painted it hammered silver). I knotted the swag on the left side and looped it over the rod using the picture from Town and Country as a guide. Once it was looped over the right side I tied another knot and just eye balled that they were even and then cut off the extra burlap.

  Here it is all finished, probably took me ten minutes to do - mostly because I retied the knots a few times. I love how it looks and it cost me a $1.00 plus a can of spray paint but I have some of that left over for another project (wonder what that will be).

  On a side note: Check out my awesome tin bucket planters, got those at a yard sale too and transplanted my house plants into them and they looks so cool!

Decorative Pumpkins

 As part of my quest to decorate my server mantel I made these decorative fall pumpkins which I found on the blog Design, Dinning and Diapers. We are currently building two rooms in our basement and we have tons of 2x4 scraps so I was looking for ways to put some of them to good use (this project fit the bill). The letter stencils I bought were 4 inches tall so Andrew cut all my blocks 4 and 1/2 inches long.

  I sanded each of the blocks to knock off any rough edges. I wasn't sure if the grain would show through so I took the time to prime them. I made five identical sets (four blocks each) so that I could give some away, so I had Andrew cut me 20 blocks.

  After priming the blocks, I spray painted them. It took two times, since I had to flip them over to do that backs and bottoms.

  Then I taped the stencils on to the blocks with painters tape and used a sponge brush to apply the black paint for the letters. The stencils still had a bit of give to them but it gave the letters an "artsy" kinda look which I liked.

  

The paints I used! The spray paint is from Lowe's and the acrylic paint is from Michael's Crafts.

  Here they are, all finished painting! 

  I don't seem to have any pictures of adding the screws for stems and the wire for the vines. Andrew drilled a pilot hole for each screw at a slightly different angle so that the stems go different directions. For the wire, I found a spool of silver wire at Michael's Crafts in the floral section - 12 yards for $3 something (they also sold it in copper and gold). I cut the wire into 3 to 4 inch pieces (longer was better) then I wrapped one end of the wire around the screw and used a pencil to wrap the remaining wire around to make a nice spiral that looked of a vine.

  Not hard at all and made a cute gift, you could totally do this for other holidays or seasons, skip the "pumpkin" look and be creative with colors and toppings - imagine the fun you could have!