T.P. and Pumpkins

I previously mentioned that some of my relatives came to visit the Keweenaw last week. When they were here, we gave them the house tour. Steve started through the house first with the men. They focused more on construction. I went through with my mom and her sister, Edith. We focused more on decor. Aunt Edie loves wood, so she was completely in love with our tongue & groove pine walls and ceilings. When we were in the loft, we passed by one of my Grandma Hall's dressers.

My grandma was Aunt Edie's mother, so she has seen this dresser countless times before, but she was enamored with some fall decor I had on top of the dresser. Fall decor? Believe me, I'm not trying to rush things. Most everything is still pretty green outside and the weather forecasters are predicting the fall color show to be about a week later than usual, and I'm totally fine with that. Really. Most of my usual fall decor is still packed away. However, I do love fall, so I couldn't resist making some DIY pumpkins 2 weeks ago. That's what Aunt Edie noticed on top of the dresser - my T.P. pumpkins. Yep, T.P. is the abbreviation for toilet paper!

You've probably seen these before. They're really simple. Just gather some fabric around a new roll of T.P. - tucking the extra fabric in the hole at the top of the roll. Then, tuck a stick into the hole for the pumpkin stem. I used a small curtain panel that I had from the Calumet house and a winter scarf, and I wrapped some old dish towels around the toilet paper to make them a little fatter first. I didn't want them to be exactly the same size. That's it. No hot glue. Nothing to buy. The best thing about this project is that you can deconstruct them so easily at the end of the season, and you haven't damaged the toilet paper or the fabric.

I made one more smaller pumpkin today, but I didn't use T.P. I used this instead.

And this - a cloth napkin.

Actually, I used 4 cloth napkins - 1 to gather around it and 3 to wrap horizontally around it to fatten it up first.

If you would like to do one extra step, you could wrap some twine or ribbon around the stem or tie a bow around the stem - to give it a little extra somethin' somethin', but I kept these very simple.

I now have pumpkins in 3 different sizes on Grandma's dresser, but I'm not promising they'll be staying in this spot when I break out the rest of my fall decor in a couple more weeks.

By the way, I love this little dresser.

Oh, and that lighthouse print? 

That's the Eagle Harbor Lighthouse just down the road from us. A man from our old church gave it to us just before we moved to the Keweenaw. I especially adore the frame.

All is well in the Keweenaw.