Decorating for Fall : Kitchen

What's the Homemaking September ShapeUp! all about?



First we decluttered, then we cleaned, then we organized, this week we're going to go through and decorate. Decorating is the fun part, and how apropos that we start decorating for fall on the first day of fall.

Fall and spring are my favorite seasons. Spring brings the flowers and green life after a long cold winter, so it is always welcome. However, I love the crispness of fall: cool breezes, crackling fires with cocoa or cider, the changing colors of the leaves and their crunch beneath my feet. I typically associate a lot of fall with smells, particularly cinnamon, nutmeg, pumpkin and apple. What better place to incorporate those smells than in the kitchen?

Top Ten Tips for Bringing Fall to Your Kitchen

1) Simmer apple cider with cinnamon sticks on your stovetop in a tea kettle.
2) Add autumn color dishtowels to your kitchen rotation.
3) Add a bouquet of autumn flowers to a small vase on your counter.
4) In an oven safe casserole dish put 2 cups water, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp nutmeg, 1 tsp ground cloves, 1 tsp vanilla. Turn your oven on as low as it will go, let it come up to temperature. Turn it off and crack the oven door.
5) I love candles, but they can get awfully expensive if you burn a lot of them. So I buy a few expensive votives with a heavenly scent and then cheap large vanilla candles from a discount store. I'll nestle 1 or 2 votives in with a larger display of the vanilla candles, and the votives give enough scent without buying larger expensive versions of the scent. I use vanilla because it's usually complimentary, but you can do this with unscented candles as well.
6) Bring your copper molds out for display or use them to hold candles, candies, cookies, flowers or other items on your counter.
7) Use pliable yellow and/or red leaves and wrap them around the inside of a clear bowl, put a single layer of cranberries inside the first bowl, nest a clear bowl on top of the cranberries, fill space between bowls with cranberries, use to hold baked fall goodies. Pumpkin Cookies!
8) Wrap raffia around a canister to hold a leaf tag in place. Use a gold or fall color sharpie to write contents on the leaf. This is really cute on flour, sugar and coffee containers.
9) Have kids make fall leaf collages to hang on your refrigerator.
10) What are your favorite tips?

Submitted to

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at Diary of a Stay at Home Mom

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