Small wall shelf in guest bathroom, mid-September through end of November — *Small wall shelf in guest bathroom*, *mid-September through end of November*

I change up the items decorating many of the shelves and tabletops in my home every couple of months, on average. Each changing season offers a different theme, a new color palette, an opportunity to shuffle things around and create an artful arrangement. It is time consuming — not only do new things go up but things come down and have to be put away. But I enjoy creating vignettes; it’s another form of visual composition, just in 3-D not on a canvas. I also love to treasure hunt, I never pass an antiques shop or flea market and not wish I could stop. Mixing up my decorative vignettes seasonally gives me a way to keep the treasures in rotation (and an excuse to keep hunting them down.)

I used to think I must be some kind of crazy to do this, but then Pinterest came along and I realized I’m definitely not alone.

Fall, in particular, offers an abundance of decorating options. I love Halloween — not the gory, horror-type but more the folksy, traditional, makes you think of a Grandma Moses painting-type. I’ve been collecting Halloween decorations since we were first married. But I’m a little late to be posting about Halloween, today I transitioned the decor to a more general fall theme for November. We went from witches to acorns and squirrels.

This may sound a little over the top, after all Christmas is right around the corner. But I’ve got some tricks for a quick change up and it didn’t take too long; it still felt like a pleasure not a chore. For Christmas I will start with a blank slate, but to make the distinction between Halloween and Thanksgiving I just did a little adding and subtracting and shuffled some things around. There are other times during the year when I do this, but adding a little Easter into Spring, or 4th of July into Summer takes even less time. We just happen to have a lot of Halloween stuff and my girls, even though they’re teenagers, really love to see it up every year.

Here is my number one tip for making frequent vignette changes easy:

Keep the same arrangement, just switch the objects in it.

This vignette on the hall table includes two decoupaged plates and a decoupaged faux pumpkin. The plates switch from a rat and jack-o-lantern to an autumn scene and turkey. The pumpkin stays.

I salvaged the cabinet doors when we remodeled our kitchen and have painted several with seasonal themes to place on the shelf above the range. I wasn’t so happy with the landscape on the Thanksgiving one, but the lettering came out as I’d imagined. I’m going to be making a folding screen for our living room from the old pantry doors using a similar style of painting a landscape within the panels. We’ll see how that goes . . .

A few more tips:

Just switching from votives to candlesticks or pillars can change the mood of an arrangement.
Have core elements that always stay the same and just arrange smaller items around them — for example, the framed picture on our family room mantel.
Objects from nature are one of the simplest ways to suggest a new season and the easiest to switch out. The bare branches in the mug on the mantel could have been asters in September; you could get from September through February with a bowl filled with apples, then mini pumpkins and then small pinecones.