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Good Morning guys! We’re live on WCCO this morning chatting about ways to decorate your mantel for the season. Here’s a video recap if you missed it…

 

From Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Years, we always try to think smart about ways to update our home when it comes to the decor. And being the holidays are so close together, we try to incorporate designs that we can save and pull bits and pieces into for the next holiday, and not have to scrap and start over every other week.

Today we wanted to chat design inspiration for your Thanksgiving decor and share a few DIY tutorials to spruce up that mantel for the season.

I cannot get enough of this gorgeous, simple mantel from French Country Cottage. This is my ideal fall landscape. Light colored Cinderella pumpkins, a ton of pinecones and of course a pop of the gold decor!

Thistlewood Farms did another beautiful landscape with their table decor. I love the white and gold pumpkins and then using candle holders to give different heights throughout. This is another great technique to use for a mantel. It helps draw the eye around the mantel or brings in focal point.

How adorable is this chalkboard and display? Holly Jane is even giving this font as a free printable for you to trace onto your chalkboard or another project. Click HERE for the free printable.

Today on WCCO we’re going to show you on to create your mantel display for under $20 with the design inspiration above.

The first step to creating a mantel for the holiday season is getting outside and wandering the woods for some free decor! Thank you Mother Nature, haha! We love bringing the outdoors in with colors, textures, and other natural elements. So why not use it for your mantel decor? We found sticks, pinecones, birch trees, and old wood all for us to use to create a new display for free. We purchased some pumpkins and gourds too.

Spray paint is our best friend. Any ugly, old beat up thing we find, I always know spray paint will make it amazing! I like a clean display where the colors all flow together, and I love mixing metals and metallics. So, for our display we’ll be showing you on WCCO today, we’re going all white, gold, and silver.

All you have to do to get that look is spray paint all of those pumpkins and gourds white. Then spray paint the sticks and pinecones gold and silver, you can even sprinkle a little gold and silver glitter on a few.

You always want one large focal point for your mantel display. Whether that’s a chalkboard, picture frame, or mirror, I always recommend having some oversized art for a focal point. Quotes are also my favorite. Nothing motivates me more than words of inspiration. So what better focal point than a chalkboard with a thankful message for Thanksgiving.

DIY Chalkboard

First step to creating a DIY chalkboard is determining your size and materials. We created our chalkboard 18″ x 25″ using a thin, inexpensive piece of plywood. If you’re putting a border onto your chalkboard you’ll also want to make sure you leave enough space for overlap for the frame to be nailed to.

Once you have your piece of wood cut, next step is to paint the chalkboard paint onto the wood. We always use Rust-Oleum Chalk Board paint from Home Depot. They also have a ton of fun colors you can use if you don’t want to use black.

While your chalkboard paint is drying you can cut your border pieces. We used an old fence from our first home. You can also buy these type of farmhouse wood at Home Depot if you don’t have access to barn wood. To cut the frame you just need to cut the edges at a 45 degree angle. Just make sure that the inner angle is the length of the board.

Once you have your four sides cut, use wood glue to adhere one angle to another and secure with a nail gun.

Complete the next three angles and you got yourself your full square border. Then flip the frame over, place the chalkboard panel onto the back of the frame and nail the board into the frame. There you have it! Your DIY chalkboard frame. We also nailed in a little ledge to the bottom of our chalkboard to hold our chalk.

If you’re not a fan of your handwriting, we love using Paper Riot’s decals. They are so adorable and easy to use. Just peel them on and peel them off when you’re ready for a new saying. This is the perfect decal for your chalkboard for Thanksgiving. But only if you do a fun color chalk. Otherwise another great option is just using old regular paint if you don’t plan on ever using the chalk and then using these fun decals.

These feathers are another decal I’m obsessing over. Not just on a wall but for a few accent pieces on your chalkboard. Makes for the perfect pop of some more gold decor, and we all know how much I love that gold!

Here’s the rest of our goodies we’ll be use to update our mantel. We’ll show you live on WCCO today what we put together! And will hopefully have video to add to this blog post after it airs to share what we came up with.

Hope you can take a tip or two and use for updating your mantel for Thanksgiving!

Happy DIY’ing and we hope you have the best Thanksgiving with your friends and family.

J + M