Before getting on with today’s post, congrats to Cynthia Goscinak.  I drew her name at random to win the giveaway of the white Silk paint colors (Cynthia, I’ve emailed you to get your mailing info, if you didn’t get my email check your spam folder).

Our temps are dropping, the nights are getting cold and the leaves are starting to turn pretty shades of yellow, orange and red.  We’ve had a couple of nights that dipped into the 30’s already and that killed off some of my coleus, so it was time to start pulling annuals out of the planters and replacing some of them with mums and ornamental kale.

Although I don’t really decorate inside the house for fall, I do like to change things up a little outside for fall.  You may remember the Fresh Flower Market sign that I made up last year using a stencil from wallcutz.  I had it hanging on the carriage house in 2021 …

And then this summer I had it hanging on the deck.

As I was looking at it earlier this week I thought it looked just a bit too summery for fall, so I decided to make it reversible.  I simply removed the hooks from the front, flipped it over, removed the hanging hardware from the back and then gave it a good clean.

Next up I pulled out some fall paint colors.  I started out with Suzanne’s Fall Colors from Dixie Belle.

However, I realized that I must have given away the Pumpkin Spice color because I couldn’t find it anywhere in my stash.  Hmmmm.  What was I thinking?  Well, no problem, Dixie Belle’s Mojave from their Silk line would work just as well.

I painted the flip side of the sign in a base coat of Juniper.  Then I pulled out my Farmers Market stencil, also from wallcutz.

By the way, this is not the sponsored project for wallcutz that I mentioned on Wednesday.  I had already purchased this stencil a couple of years ago and I’ve used it on several projects already including some old table leaves that I turned into signs last fall.

I had to make a few adjustments to the spacing and design of the stencil to work with my uneven surface.  I started by stenciling just the bottom line of wording on the raised border at the bottom of my cupboard door using Cashmere.

Next I stenciled the words ‘always fresh’ in Dixie Belle’s Cocoa Bean.  Then I adjusted the stencil slightly over and down and stenciled just the word ‘farmers’ also in the Cocoa Bean.  Thus I created a shadow behind that word when I moved the stencil back into place and stenciled over the Cocoa Bean with more Cashmere.

Creating a shadow this way is so, so simple and it adds a ton of impact.  I highly recommend it for the wording on signs especially.

I completed the rest of the stenciling just using Cashmere straight up.  If you look back at the image of this stencil, you’ll see that there is a box around the word “market”.  I left that out on my sign because I thought it would be hard to get that to look right going over that raised piece in the middle.

While we’re on that topic, you might be wondering how I stenciled over that raised section in the middle.  Basically I was just very careful to hold the stencil as flat as possible and to not get too heavy handed with the paint.  Then, once I pulled the stencil away I went back in with a small brush and touched up those letters that fell on the uneven surface and needed a little more paint.

Next up I stenciled the little do-dads on either side of the word ‘market’ in Mojave.  This is where I would have liked to have that Pumpkin Spice color on hand, but I think the Mojave substituted nicely.  Once that was dry I added a little swoop of Cashmere to give them a little more dimension too.

After all of the paint was dry, I sanded my new Farmers Market sign to distress the edges and make everything look a little more worn, and then I added a coat of Big Mama’s Butta to finish it off.

I added some mums, a faux pumpkin and a little wooden lantern to the bench under the sign.

That’s part of the I.O.D. Label Ephemera transfer on that bucket, and the pot on the right with the yellow mum is concrete, but has been given the faux rust treatment using Dixie Belle’s patina paint (you can check out how to do that here).

I absolutely love how this sign turned out!

And that might be a problem come spring when it’s time to turn it back around to the flower market side.  I may have to re-paint that side in similar colors now because these colors look great up against the dark green of my siding.  Plus, I also have to admit that my sign stenciling skills have improved greatly over time.

What do you think?  And how about you, do you change up your outside décor for fall?  Leave a comment and let me know.