Autumn decoration – crafts in the fall

Fall is harvest time and your garden now offers you plenty to harvest. Hopefully lots of delicious fruit and veg and herbs to help you keep your diet healthy and varied over the winter. But that doesn’t mean the fall pleasure of harvesting in the garden is over. You certainly have some plants in the garden that you can still do something with in the fall.

• Various trees and shrubs color their leaves in an extremely gorgeous way just so you can use them as decorations
• Roses, whose blossoms have been allowed to mature, contribute decorative rose hips
• Other bushes bear other fruits that can be used, all kinds of berries in all kinds of colors
• The old beech hedge provides beechnuts
• The pine contributes pine branches and the fir contributes pine branches, and both drop cones
• Maybe your rose has not only rose hips, but also flowers, some of which you should dry for your autumn crafts
• Other late blossoms can also be preserved, depending on the blossom better by drying or pressing.
• Ivy and Virginia creeper provide decorative garlands of branches that last for quite a while
• Ornamental grasses are happy to lend their long-lasting and exceptionally attractive inflorescences for handicrafts

Real handicraft freaks go through the garden with their eyes wide open during every autumn tidying up anyway. Every oddly shaped dead twig, every beautifully crooked withered branch and many dried flowers and infructescences of all kinds of plants go into the craft box. You don’t believe that you can still put all these parts to good use? Here are a few ideas for beautiful and quick fall decorations.

Autumn decoration from the harvest

Sometimes you only need very few ingredients from the garden to create an effective and sometimes really surprising decoration for your house:

You only need to take enough of some parts of the autumn harvest, they always make beautiful autumn decorations for the vase. Traditional fall bouquets are composed of branches with fall leaves, some dried fruit sprigs and maybe some last fresh blossoms. Such arrangements actually always look very charming, in large vases on the corner table or in small vases on the dining table. Do you have Christmas roses in the garden? They only last about a week in the vase, but a single fresh blossom in the midst of some autumn twigs definitely makes an extraordinary autumn decoration.

If you like modern design, it’s even easier for you: You decide on a natural beauty from your collection and mix it with a material that is as unusual as possible, e.g. B. from the hardware store. In other words, autumn branches with colorful leaves, together in a vase with just as many “twigs” made of simple round aluminum rods, solid material with a diameter of 2 cm. Delicate cream colored fronds of grass will growpaired with many thin acrylic rods, or rose hips stuck between white decorative pebbles in a bowl, or pine branches combined with flowers dried on the stem. You can easily surpass these ideas, especially with material combinations you can create a lot of really eye-catching autumn decorations. Just think what else can be imagined with a little thought when including LED light chains!

Your garden may even have some “fresh produce”: A single Christmas rose together with a few artificial branches and leaves, which you have cut out in a slightly futuristic form from plastic foil, which you like to have in a strong and unusual colour, make a sensational decoration in a simple glass vase .

Autumn decoration from the forest

If you want to make fall table decorations or home decorations, you’re not just limited to the produce in your garden. You can very well complete your decoration material on the next walk in the forest:

• In any case, the autumn forest provides a wide variety of gnarled and dry branches, with and without bark, for arrangements and “arrangement sculptures”.
• There is also moss for flower arrangements, mostly in different colours
• And chestnuts and a few leaves, particularly beautifully colored in gold
• Beautiful stones and full spruce needle bushes are also collected
• Ripe cranberries and various bizarrely designed mushrooms complete the collection basket

Very beautiful and very autumnal decorations, which fit perfectly with the season, can be easily arranged from all these collectible finds in flat bowls or made on floral foam as arrangements, or you can make door wreaths out of them.

Instructions for an autumn door wreath

Do you want specific instructions? Here you go:

• You need a metal ring or a straw wreath
• Then flexible branches about 20 cm long, holly, ivy or vine e.g. B.
• Then binding wire and clips and lots of decorative accessories from the garden
• This can be dried fruit or nuts or cones and much more
• The wreath can be completed with purchased decoration material
• There is e.g. B. to buy pretty wooden pendants or felt flowers or artificial mushrooms

If you are already doing the autumn handicrafts, you can of course make other ingredients for your autumn wreath, for example small clay figures. Let your imagination run wild. You can also use colorful ribbons and decorative pins, or you can opt for a more reserved wreath on which only a few ingredients such as chestnuts and fruits are combined. That can look very elegant.

More craft ideas

If you are going to do autumnal handicrafts with the children, the best thing to do is to create Christmas presents right away, and there are many ideas for this:

• The collected autumn leaves are glued to construction paper to form pictures, in abstract symmetrical forms or figurative forms
• Laminated in foil and then cut out with the edge, beautiful, large autumn leaves become elegant coasters
• With these pictures you can also use the leftovers from your spice cupboard, older children “paint” beautiful landscapes from plant remains and spices
• The stone finds get color and start a new career as a paperweight for the recipient
• To do this, dark stones are first primed with white acrylic paint and then painted, most craft paints are suitable for painting
• If the finished piece of jewelry is covered with clear varnish, the images will remain for a long time
• Chestnuts and toothpicks stimulate the imagination of many children, whole families of animals can be created here that look wonderfully weird

Unusual “autumn decorations”

There are also gardeners who like to tinker, no doubt, but gardeners are very fond of tinkering with something that will later be useful for the garden:

The stick propagation

At least if you have many shrubs in the garden that are worthy of being passed on to other garden and shrub lovers. These gardeners devote themselves to the propagation of cuttings in autumn and in this way create many attractive gifts for fellow gardeners:

• The stick is the late brother of the cuttings cut soon after the beginning of budding.
• Flowering shrubs such as Deutzia and Forsythia, but also currants and wine can be propagated with sticks.
• You could always be lucky with cuttings propagation if a shrub grows fairly quickly and easily.
• In other words: Everything that quickly sprout again after radical pruning is usually also suitable as sticks.
• As soon as growth has noticeably come to a standstill, the sticks can be cut, i.e. after the leaves have fallen in the case of deciduous varieties.
• A stick is cut from a strong last year’s outdoor shoot, of which the lower part is used (cut diagonally at the bottom and straight at the top).
• It is cut to about hand length, just below an eye (recognizable shoot approach), from which the new roots develop.
• The nurseries, which propagate in quantities from cuttings, store these temporarily in order to give them to the ground in spring.
• However, the cutting wood, which is to become a gardening Christmas gift, should look good.
• Therefore, immediately after cutting, it is sunk in a pot that should be about 20 cm high.
• Now the stick can be given away and will someday make the next gardener happy as a strong shrub.

plant signs

There are also gardening accessories for gardeners, which they can use very well for autumnal handicrafts: tasteful signs for the plants that will be invited into the garden next year. Now that autumn is here, the memory of the garden year is still fresh. Now is the time to write down what to replant next year. Because now you can still remember very well this or that idea that you received during the gardening year. The concrete planting plan for the next year is usually tackled later. After the winter preparations, the gardener really deserves a little break from the garden.

However, one of the most beautiful autumn crafts, even for creative adults without children, is the production of attractive plant plugs. You can immediately use the notes with the new plantings planned for next year. Some existing plants could certainly do with a nice sign as well. Plant labels can be made from many materials, from ready-made, waterproof hang tags, from plastic foil, from wood, from clay or from old silver cutlery. They can be written on in just as many ways, with waterproof pens, with paint and brush, with a small milling machine, with a metal pen for scratching or with a branding tool. In any case, after such handicrafts you are very well prepared for the next gardening year.

build hedgehog house

Gardeners with children will have to answer questions as they winterize the garden, questions about how all the animals hibernate. Well, you and your children can at least help the hedgehogs hibernate by building them a hedgehog house:

• You need a ready-made box or wooden boards that you screw together to form a little house
• The interior space for the hedgehog should have a base area of ​​at least 30 x 30 cm and a corresponding height
• In order for the hedgehog to feel comfortable, the hedgehog house needs a waterproof roof
• You can use tarpaulin or another wooden board to cover the hedgehog house
• The entrance to the house must not be too big, about 10 x 10 cm is enough, otherwise your hedgehog could get a visit from “predators”.
• You can comfortably pad the house with straw and insulate the outside against the cold with mats, brushwood or leaves

You can tell if a hedgehog has moved in if you stick a delicate twig in the middle of the entrance, which the hedgehog will knock over when it moves into its house.

Conclusion
There are many things you can craft in the fall, not just beautiful fall decorations. But you can also make a whole series of Christmas presents when crafting in autumn, for which you simply collected the ingredients in the garden, just like for the most beautiful autumnal decorations. Especially for children, handicrafts should not only be part of everyday life in autumn, there are few leisure activities that stimulate creativity in a similar way.