Autumn Door Decor

Last week on Andrea Currie’s Craft-tastic Live show, her theme was Fall Door Decor.  Between that and the beauty of fall I see all around me, I was very inspired to create something for my front door.  I’ve had these garlands of corn husks around for quite a few years.  I purchased them at Michaels at an end of season clearance sale.  When I was teaching, I wanted to use the idea of these garlands for a display we were doing but didn’t have nearly enough of them so I made some of my own.  They are quite simple to make, assuming you can find a supply of corn husks.  On the purchased garland, you can see that some were dyed and then they are simply sewn together.  I found they went through my sewing machine quite easily!

The base of this…hmmm I’m not even sure what to call it!!!! It’s not really a wreath per se – more like a star burst!  In any case, the base of this piece was simply a circle that I cut out of a cardboard pop case I had in the recycle bin.  I used my hot glue gun and glued the corn husk garland onto the circle so that it sprayed out much like the rays of the sun or a star burst.  This made the center of the circle quite thick and I used more hot glue to secure those pieces and make it less bulky looking.

From there it was all about embellishment!  I dried some orange and lemon slices in my oven (you can certainly use a dehydrator if you have one).  If you would like more details about how to dry citrus fruit in your oven (limes and grapefruit are lovely as well), be sure to check out Cool2Craft and my blog tomorrow as I’ll be sharing tips for it there.  The metallic looking leaves you see on this piece are done with a burnt brown paper bag technique and again, if you’d like to learn how to do that, Heidi Borchers is demonstrating that technique on Cool2Craft tomorrow!  UPDATE:  Here’s the Youtube of Heidi demonstrating the burnt bag technique:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_5xPKCb58]

The final touch was some tiny little pinecones that I picked up last fall – I guess technically they’re not pinecones because they didn’t come from pine trees but I’m not really sure what kind of tree they did fall from.  For the hanger, I used a hole punch to put a hole in the cardboard base on the back of the door hanging and then used a small piece of chenille stem (pipe cleaner) through that hole to create a loop to hang it from.