Fall Festivities

It is now officially fall!! I haven’t spent any time working in my faerie garden since August! I have to turn my head and ignore it in order to deal. I am ready to plant fall flowers and clean up for winter but—can’t…

We are having our front porch replaced, as well as siding installed and I am pretty sure my poor faerie garden will be trampled. I will remove all faeries and houses, of course. And there are a few plants that I will be able to save by transplanting them to containers. When I dismantle this little garden I will take photos, and you may see a tear or two!! When I put it back together I will do before and after photos. The good (?) thing is now I can continue to make changes started after the critter damage earlier this year. A marauding skunk (?) uprooted my plants and for awhile it was a very sorry little garden.

Our latest project turned out so well I just had to share it with you! Our daughter was married in her backyard at the end of August. She asked us to make an arbor, with a flower swag over the top, as a backdrop for the wedding. Absolutely right up our alley!! And isn’t it beautiful? Of course, proud mama had to include a photo of our three daughters in front of the arbor.

The bi-fold doors we used were perfect for the arbor; they were left over from a closet remodel. All they needed was painting and “antiquing”. They turned out very nice, as you can see—just took a primer coat and then two coats of paint. I love antiquing things; it brings out all the details marvelously, and I loved the way these turned out (see first photo taken in garage). Hubby attached brackets to the door backs so they would be sturdy. In case you are wondering why we used three doors on each side, we used the inside doors as a sort of doorway, both for looks and to stabilize; you can see this in the finished photo. When we attached the floral swag across the top and staked the doors in the yard, they were very stable. The second garage photo shows the swag “beginnings”, and a stabilizing bar across the top of the doors in the background.

When we started this project, our daughter had her mind set on a bouquet, which we used as a color guide, but midway through the project she changed her mind, deciding on a different bouquet, which added a color. So we found these lovely golden flowers at Hobby Lobby; the perfect finishing touch for this swag. And, being a faerie garden person, I could easily have found a place to tuck a tiny faerie in amongst the flowers, had our daughter been so inclined.

When all the festivities were over, we kind of thought we would take these doors home and use them as an entrance to our backyard garden. Our daughter has a lovely home, but we didn’t think there was a place she could use these. However, she did find a place for them! Now I would very much like to create something similar for our garden, using real plants, maybe flowering vines.