Crazy About Chalkboard

I bought this basket at Target the other day:

The little chalkboard tiles just threw me over the edge. It had to come home with me. It sits atop my refrigerator right now for extra kitchen storage. But after looking around, there's so many other places I would love to have it; inside the front door to hold all my everyday shoes, beside the couch to store extra blankets, in the bathroom for extra towels. It's a good thing there was only one on the shelf, or I might have just bought them all! Bad Megan.

I'm a sucker for baskets... and chalkboard. Especially together!



See? The chalkboard and baskets also came from Target. I do love that store.



I want to do this in my house someday. A chalkboard door! This would be super quick and simple with a can of chalkboard paint.



There it is again! This is going in my ideas-for-when-we-finally-buy-a-house folder. :)

My 5 Minute Grain Sack Pillow

It seems like everywhere I look lately, I see grain sack pillows- and I love them. But sadly I have yet to find one at a price I can afford.


$195 for the pair from Etta Bloom


$145 from L'aviva Home


Even Pottery Barn has jumped on the band wagon. Pillow covers for $89-$99.

Like I said, just too pricey for me and my tiny budget. So with a few things I already had around the house and a quick 5 minutes, I made myself a DIY (and free) grain sack pillow!


I started out with a pillow I got about a year ago at Marshall's. I used electrical tape to tape off a single stripe down the middle. Painters tape might work better, but I didn't have any on hand.


Then with some brown fabric paint, I painted the stripe.


After letting the paint dry for about a minute, I slowly peeled off the tape. I should have just left it on to do the rest of the stripes, but I wanted to make sure it would actually make a nice straight line.


And it did!


So I taped off a couple more stripes and painted those too.


More peeling! My favorite part. :)


I didn't put the tape on as smoothly as I could have, so it left a few bare spots where the pillow was wrinkling. I just used a q-tip to fill those in.


And there you have it! A quick and simple faux grain sack pillow at no cost to me. :)

Have a nice weekend!

Autumn Kitchen

Fall has arrived in our home! I took a trip out to the local pumpkin farm yesterday and gathered up some pumpkins and gourds to decorate our place. I just love pumpkin farms!
(Side note: I'm looking for something to hang on either side of that wall cabinet. Some white plates maybe?)





So often when people think of pumpkins, the big old orange ones come to mind. But there's so many others! The little white ones are my favorite.





The Pottery Barn table runner desperately needs to be ironed- but I don't have an iron. I tried to use my hair straightener but as you can see it didn't work so well. :)



I also gave our gray-green dining table a fresh coat of white paint. Much better!

Sprouting Pumpkins

It's finally here... my absolute favorite time of year- Fall! Well if you want to be all technical, it's actually not here until tomorrow at 11:09 p.m. But it is full-blown fall as far as I'm concerned. I've been in heaven with these cool 60 degree temperatures the past few weeks. In all my excitement I had Jesse take out the ugly window air conditioner and banish it to the basement for its winter hibernation. And then of course, this whole week is forecast to be in the mid-80s... We are going to bake.



Fall decorations are slowly starting to sprout up at our place. I had just a few fake pumpkins that I scattered in a couple places. I plan to go out tomorrow and load up on the real stuff. :)

Here's a couple photos from The Newlywed Diaries that I'm loving right now. They're from a fall issue of Martha Stewart Living:





I would love to do this on my dining room table. Pile it full of gourds and pumpkins with a few deer antlers thrown in. And I've got plenty of deer antlers already! It would look great with my new burlap table runner, which you'll see later. I got it from Pottery Barn with the gift card I won earlier. :)

Fall is also the time of year when I wish I had a nice formal front entrance to our house. So I could do this:



Just. Delicious.