Julie Finn
One of my favorite things about autumn is how long I can leave my decorations up. I put my Christmas decorations up the day after Thanksgiving, and my Valentine’s Day decorations up the first day of February, and my Fourth of July decorations up the last week in June, but I start putting my fall decorations up as soon as the first leaves begin to turn here around the beginning of September, and I don’t take them down until I’m ready to replace them with my Christmas decorations.
Talk about getting bang for your buck!
In my opinion, the best autumn decorations are the ones that work well for both Halloween and Thanksgiving. So no bats or jack-o-lanterns or ghosties around here, but instead LOTS of acorns and pumpkins and brown and orange.
If you’d like to try your hand at your own decorations that you can leave up for a good long time, check out these five tutorials for fall garlands and autumn buntings that make use of upcycled materials:
Rough-looking fabrics like denim and burlap and sacking all look well in autumn buntings, but out of those, denim is probably the easiest fabric to upcycle from old blue jeans. You should stitch around the perimeter of each pennant, but you don’t need to hem, because everybody knows that frayed blue jeans look awesome.
You can easily customize a bunting with applique–through a judicious use of blank and lettered flags, you could even have a double-sided bunting with HALLOWEEN on one side and THANKSGIVING on the other.
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