Fall Vignette Style In 3 Easy Steps

It is fall. Season of cute fashion, pumpkin lattes and bake sales.

Bake sales unglue me. This is because I am not a good baker. And not a good packager.

So I am a little apprehensive that I have signed up to provide 18 cutely packaged, baked items on Friday.

I am about to call my mother for some ideas. Grandma Guru is the only domestic goddess I know who owns and uses a glaze gun intended to seal elaborate desserts.

Probably I will not be using her glaze gun for my bake sale items.

Because I had an unfortunate kitchen fire incident just last week. And there weren’t even any glaze guns involved. Just a paper napkin I was using to pry a hot muffin out of the tin, which was sitting on the oven, next to a burner that was on.

That napkin went up in flames pretty fast, but not as fast as guru girl, who shot over to the sink and doused the whole mess before the flames further exploded.

I am already agitated about the bake sale. I don’t need to add any more excitement to the prep.

But here’s a prep I do enjoy: decorating the front porch for fall. Exciting, easy and involves no fire!

Luckily, Grandma Guru is also an expert in this. Here are her top tips for…

Fall Festing Up Your Front Door:

1.      Varying heights put the “wow” in a fall vignette. Visit your local garden center and look for 3 to 4 different types of filler.

2.    In the picture above, Grandma Guru has selected mums, garden cabbages and dried grasses. She’s artfully arranged them in cute containers. But if you don’t have any of these, you can buy mums that come in cheap, wooden baskets. These won’t last more than a season, but they look cute and are reasonable. (Most grocery stores sell the mum/container duo for around $12.)

3.    You do need to get a basket for the dried grasses and shafts of wheat in the background. Line the bottom of the container with floral foam so you can wedge the grasses into it, and they’ll stand up straight.

4.    Once you’ve styled up your fall vignette, it will last a month or two as long as you remember to water the mums. Bonus! The dried grasses/wheat last forever so you can save them for next year’s vignette.

This fall vignette will make you look and feel like your home is straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog. Until you open the front door and the illusion is shattered by pesky real life things like flaming napkins, which give your kitchen entirely the wrong kind of amber glow.

Happy fall, guru girls & guys!