Rustic Fall Flower Boxes

If you are anything like me, you are left with naked flower boxes by the time fall rolls around. Fall happens to be this Gypsy's favorite season, so I am always looking for new and interesting ways to decorate for this crisp and colorful time of year.
This year I decided to create my own rustic pumpkins to add color to the front of our home. My first stop was my husband's scrap wood pile where I picked out a pile of thin boards that I thought would make interesting pumpkins. I laid out my 3 "groups" on the ground so I could get a better idea of what would look best: a big square board in front of a tall skinny board, some boards vertical, some horizontal, etc. When I had all my pumpkin boards chosen, I gathered interesting thin scraps to use as stems, again choosing a variety of tall and thin and short and fat.
Making sure you remember which end is the "top" of the pumpkin from your previous layout decision time, use a chop saw (of a handsaw if you are not comfortable with power tools) to cut the top 2 corners off of your boards so they look less square and more "pumpkiny" (I sweet talked my hubby into doing this for me)
Next came the painting, I used orange, red and yellow paint and mixed up several different shades of pumpkin and squash colors, whatever struck my fancy, some very dark and some very light and all the rest somewhere in the middle. I suggest you paint each pumpkin in your groups a different color so they stand out better from each other. I did the same process with green for the stems, making some a darker green and some a lighter green. After lightly painting some faint lines on the pumpkins to suggest shadows from their seams, I screwed the stems onto the backs of the pumpkins with a screwgun and used a staple gun to attach some pieces of grapevine I had left over from another project. (A great way to stockpile cheap grapevine is to buy old Christmas wreathes at garage sales and re-sale shops, I buy them for about a quarter each by the bag full, cut the pieces holding the wreath together and am left with feet and feet of grapevine) and carted them all out to the flower boxes.

My husband screwed some small sticks of wood onto the backs of some of the smaller pumpkins for steaks so they would stand up better, you can do this if you do not have something for your pumpkins to lean against.
After putting the pumpkins into the flower boxes, I added some fake fall flowers and leaves that I picked up at our Goodwill for about $5 and bingo! Pretty fall flower boxes that are rustic, unique and lovely!