Halloween or Fall Front Porch Decor

It was a sunny afternoon so I decided to decorate the front porch overhang - I don't always hang up Halloween stuff this early but might as well do it while it's nice out!

I used 6 small fake pumpkins, 7 rubber hanging bats, a big metal star, and 2 strands of garland leaves.

Put some thin wire (I have a roll of a lightweight gauge silver wire that I use for tons of things - get it at the craft store or maybe check the hardware store if you're there) thru the pumpkin stems, leaving ends long enough to hang them - I did different lengths to stagger them. The bats came with an elastic cord attached to hang them, I added some heavy string to a couple of them so they aren't all at the same level.

I nailed in a few small nails to the backside of the overhang (um, maybe don't tell my husband that part - he hasn't asked how I got these decorations to stay up and I'm not volunteering the info...) then I hung the star first in the center, then spaced out the pumpkins, then the bats, and then hung the garland over all of the nails. It's windy today and I was worried they might fly off the nails so I took some little twist ties from our trash bags and wound them around the ends of the nails to keep things in place. I hung one of the bats from the bottom of the side light and he looks cool spinning around down there.

Sarge and those ears...he looks like a bat!
Fits right in with the decorations. 

I thought about hanging some orange mini lights up there too but there isn't very much room left on the small nails - plus I didn't feel like dealing with the extension cord! That would look good though...

 Find some Halloween things you like that can stand up to being outside and give this a try - If you don't have an overhang maybe adapt this idea to decorate around the door or columns next to your door?

Pumpkin Tower

Thought I'd make a tower of pumpkins to put outside our front door, usually I put a carved pumpkin in the birdbath but this year wanted to try something different. I bought three different sizes of carvable fake pumpkins (10", 12", 14") to stack up - once I did it though I decided three was too tall and it looked like the leaning tower of pumpkin...plus how to anchor so it wouldn't fall over in the wind?

I started by cutting a hole in the bottom of the smallest pumpkin, to fit over the second pumpkins stem - I had to carve off some of the top to make them lay flat against each other, then I hot glued them in place.




For the third/bottom pumpkin I cut off the stem and used 4 skewers to attach it to the middle
pumpkin. It worked fine but was too tall and tippy - so I removed the bottom one and like it much better that way. I'll find another thing to do with the white one...

 I finished by putting an inexpensive grapevine wreath on the birdbath,  stuck down the 2 pumpkins in the birdbath with some museum putty (earthquake proof sticky stuff that almost has the consistency of chewed gum), and filled around the pumpkins with natural excelsior moss.