Frugal crafts for Fall

As the time draws closer and closer to my favourite time of the year, I pause to savor the moments. It’s really frightening to think of what’s happening around us these days. Keeping busy with work and crafts helps to keep us sane.

As usual, aside from our work, we always take some time to escape and get into crafts. You might have seen on my Instagram last week that for the first time ever, we actually decorated for Fall (Autumn).

Today I am sharing with you some of the new and easy, and most of all, inexpensive crafts we have been doing this week. We hope you find some inspiration for things you can do too.

Ceramic tray

We actually always admire these trays and we saw someone making one on YouTube. This inspired us to have a go too. They are usually sold for well over £100. But who wants to spend that type of money? Ours doesn’t even cost £10. We thought that we could get the same effect with a ceramic tile from Tile Choice.

We used a piece of felt to glue to the bottom to prevent the tray from scratching the table. You might be wondering how we managed to conceal the raw colour of the tile on the sides. For that, we used a little acrylic paint to cover the sides.

For the handles, we used 2 cupboard door handles that we had left over when we did the kitchen about 6 or 7 years ago! That’s why we love holding onto stuff! We always think that they will come in handy. Is that being cheap or being frugal? Do let us know what you think.

To secure the handles, we used our trusty tube of E600 glue. It’s the absolute best as it holds it in place so well. After leaving it to sit overnight, it was clear that the handles weren’t going to go anywhere.

In the video that we saw on Youtube, the lady actually used epoxy resin to give the surface a pretty glossy look. We didn’t think we needed to do that as the ceramic tile already had a shiny surface.

This can be used to style your dining table or sideboard or even your dressing table. It’s your choice really.

Here’s ours in use in the living room.

Crocheted Fall pumpkin

Leisa is so good at watching crochet videos and replicating the designs. So she recently watched Bella Coco’s pumpkin video, bought some crochet yarn at B and M or Home Bargains for one pound each. This price was actually a bargain as we’ve noticed that the price of yarn has gone up rather significantly since the lockdown started.

This is the pumpkin so far. Of course, I will upload a photo of the finished product. But so far, I think it is going well.

The full reveal is here:

Is it cute of what?

Making a vase as part of your frugal crafts for Fall

So Leisa saw this pretty bottle of drink in the shop and thought that the empty bottle would make a nice vase. So she bought the drink and set to work repurposing the bottle.

First, the top quarter of the bottle was cut off. To soften the raw edge, we used a warm iron to press down on the top for a few seconds. Be careful if you try this. We used a piece of parchment paper to protect the iron.

Then we spray painted the bottle white. It was really pretty but we decided to go one step further to make the vase look more modern.

Have you noticed that a lot of the vases nowadays are textured? Not only are they textured but they are two-toned too. So of course we tried to give it a go. To achieve the textured look, all we did was to add a little baking soda to the paint. The more textured you want it, the more baking soda you need to add. You can vary the pattern by taping off certain sections and painting them in different colours.

Now, we did learn some lessons here:

When it was spray painted white, it was beautiful and probably should have been left that way
The frog tape that we used to tape off a section removed some of the spray paint
The vase will probably need something like sand in the base to keep it upright since it is really lightweight.
We need to revisit this craft and change up some of the processes but we think this is doable

Gathering the seeds

I know that this isn’t necessarily craft related but it could be. If you are creative and love to see your garden pretty in the upcoming seasons, then do like us and gather in the seeds while you can.

We’ve allowed a lot of the flowers to dry down so that we can harvest their seeds for next year. This ensures that you have more of the same flowers that used to beautify your garden. Is this clever or what?

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