Fall It Up Y'all

I've fallin' in love with my new pitch fork.

Now I know I'm no florist but most of us DIY'ers aren't.  A florist might know a better way but, hey it's my blog, my project and my way.  After digging through the shed and finding this old rusty pitch fork, I headed up to the attic and dug around and found the most pitiful, forlorn flowers I could find and drug them down. Now if we stopped right there and created the arrangement that would have been a simple project in itself.

But no, I went the hard route because I just can't throw anything away.  The flowers I found in my attic were a little worse for wear but I found a way to refresh them.

They were dirty, grimmie and just smushed up in general.

The secret trick is to hold them over a pot of boiling water for about a minute. Yep the steam relaxes the silk so that you can get them back in shape.  As a side note the steam also cleaned them.  The dirty water proved it and they looked so dang much better.

Excuse the photo being sideways.  I have to stop taking pictures that need to be flipped because this shows up correctly in photobucket but not here and frankly I'm sick of fighting with it.
*Another tip - when holding the flowers over the steam bend the stem so you don't have to have your hand in the steam.

See don't they look so much better.  Just pop them off the stem and lay them out on paper towels so they can dry out.  Shape them up a little with your fingers.  Of course I couldn't just do the few I needed, I had to freshen my whole box full of flowers.  This is what took me so long.

See all my pretty fresh flower heads.  Yes, I put them back on their legs, once I was done.  Then I gathered my pitch fork and set my sights on crafting some fall prettiness.

And this is what you get when you're done.

Even poor little old shaggy Mattie liked it.

She's happy to be outside but she is almost 13 years old, that's 91 years our time, and she poops out on me quick.

I'm pretty pickin' happy with the finished product.  Especially since I didn't spend one shiny penny.  That's right nada and all because I cleaned up my old stinky flowers.  Hey even the wicker settee was free.  Thank you to my neighbors down the road!!  Gotta love FREE....

But I wasn't done.  I had to run out to the shed to hang this...

I love fall and all it's blazin' glory.

Un-hun, that's rain you see at the top of the picture.  See how much I love y'all.  I'll do anything to get the shot and finish a blog post.

I'll be back tomorrow to show off my new-to-me settee tomorrow.

Fall it up y'all...

Nothing is too hard for God.
                                               ~Jeremiah 32:17b