Happy Halloween!

I had decided a while ago that I wanted to do a "Thankful Tree" for Thanksgiving this year and I'm excited that now that it is done.
We have a new table that my talented hubby built this spring (new chairs are on the list, but for now my old ones work). With a new table, I needed to do a new center piece! I also have to keep in mind that legos have made their way into our house, which means, my table needs to be ready for it almost every night! So for my fall center piece I kept it small, except for my "Thankful Tree". Not having a chandelier, gives me plenty of room to go TALL.
I used 1/4 yard of plaid fabric and placed books under it to give some things an extra lift. My niece and daughter brought in all sorts of leaves, so we scattered those around too. I painted the pumpkins with an off-white with gold on the steams & for my words. 
For my "Thankful Tree" I pruned some of our trees, used some spray glue and glitter to add a bit of bling and filled up my wood vase with the finished branches. Every day of November we will each think about what we are Thankful for and fill out a tag.
<I was going to make some cute ones, but then I found these are Meijers for around $2 or $3, and figured - Why not?>

How are you getting ready for Thanksgiving?
Happy Halloween and Happy Fall, ya'll! ;-)
Thanks for stopping by!
Megan

PS>Speaking of Holidays, I am working on some Holiday Decorating packages to help take some of the stress off you, so that you can sit back and ENJOY each part of the Holiday season! I will have more information for you soon!

Hi Everyone!
This has nothing to do with home design...
School has been going for almost 2 months now and I am having a hard time adjusting.
K started young 5's this year, he goes ALL day, EVERY day! I was really excited for him to start to school because I knew he would love it and (silly me) I thought that it would be easier to have 1 kid most of the day and I would actually get more done.
While it is true: he loves school and running errands is quicker with 1 kid, nothing else is - M gets bored if I'm not playing with her. I have enjoyed my extra bonding time with M - we've finally clicked, HA (only took 2 years) - but, I miss my little man! 
I've had a couple of long work days and thankfully daddy kept the kids up so that I could say goodnight and put them to bed because otherwise, I would not have seen them at all.
At this point I am tempted to let him take a day off, just so I can hang out with him for a bit...
How do/did you adjust to your first going to school? I think that we are going to have to make sure to start scheduling monthly mommy-son dates.
I have to admit, I never thought that I would be feeling like this... I figured that I would be the mom super excited for school to start - now I'm just not so sure about this whole school thing! No, homeschooling is not in our future. :-)
Since I am posting about my kiddos, I might as well show them off too, right?

How could you not miss either of these silly cute kids?
Thanks for stopping by!
Megan

I found this great print on Pintrest. I loved it and knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.

But the more I looked at it, I figured that I could do them myself... So I decided to try!
Here is what I did!
I started out by making photo copies of pages from a book. I just picked pages that were full with words and had no pictures on them. When coping the pages, be sure to keep it straight - it's a little harder than you would think!
I then found pictures of butterflies and added them to a blank Word document - that way I could move it around a little bit to get it in the center of the page. I then printed each butterfly on to the copied page of the book (make sure that you load the paper in correctly, you don't want your butterfly upside down - I may have done that, oops). 
Once printed they looked like this!

 I then soaked each paper in a "tea bath". To make my tea bath, I used 3 black tea bags, brewed the tea in a cup of water for about 5 minutes, then poured it in to a 9x13 pan. The sheet of paper then soaked in the tea for about 5 minutes. When removing the paper from the "tea bath" be careful not to rip the paper.

 After soaking, I then "baked" the sheet of paper on a cookie sheet for 3 minutes at 300 degrees.

I trimmed my paper to fit my picture -because I put the paper in a picture frame, I didn't need to flatten the sheets, if you are not planning on putting your sheet in a frame, you may want to flatten it first by placing heavy books on top of it.

I played around with the tea bath a little bit first, see the difference of my tries below.  You may want to play around with times and tea bags to make sure you get the look that you want. The fun part of this project is that you can add a picture of anything that you want! And that it costs pretty much nothing!
So have fun playing! 

Here is my finished project!

What do you think? I had a bunch of fun doing this and love how it looks! The fun part of this project is that you can add a picture of ANYTHING that you want! And it costs pretty much nothing!
So play around with it and make it fit you! I would love to see what you do with it! Show me in the comments or on Instagram >#JelsAveDIY .
Thanks for stopping by!
Megan