Fall Decorating Ideas - Painted Harvest Basket

One of the things I love about decorating for the Fall season is that you can leave it up through Thanksgiving and enjoy the warm and beautiful colors of the season for weeks. As part of the fall decorations for my mantel, this year I decided to make a fall themed painted harvest basket.

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In Sevierville, TN, we have a local restaurant and gift shop called The Apple Barn ®. In the gift shop there is a entire attic space full of baskets and buckets. I was able to pick up a couple of apple harvest baskets for around $4.00 each to use as holiday decorations. One of them you might see around Christmas time, but for the first project I decided to stain and paint a harvest colored themed basket.

Painted Harvest Basket

I didn’t want to display the basket in the original raw wood color, so I decided to stain it first before applying any paint colors. Using a foam brush, I applied one coat of Minwax Early American wood stain and allowed it to dry overnight.

This will take more than one coat of stain to cover all of little folds and crannies of the basket.

I wanted to add some fall colors, similar to leaves on the trees, to the basket so I purchased four Apple Barrel ® acrylic paint colors in Spiced Berry, Mountain Forest, Golden Yellow, and Pumpkin Orange. Starting on the bottom wood strip of the basket, I applied these colors to the outside wood strips of the harvest basket. Since the wood strips are still very porous even with a coat of stain, the paint colors dried to a rustic aged finish. Exactly the look I was going for with this basket. Rustic and fall colors combined.

Using plastic grocery bags to fill up the bottom of the basket, it was easy to just add small Styrofoam pumpkins, fall leaf picks and sunflower picks to the basket for a beautiful fall themed display for our mantel.