Rats, and Bats, and Crows - Oh My! Halloween Mantle

I know I promised you Bella Rustica in the 'next' post, but I had to put that off until I get all my photos organized this weekend. For now, I interrupt that process to show you the Halloween Mantle at the shop.

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Being in retail, you have to keep up with the holidays, and fall is the beginning of all of my favorites. There's so much decorating opportunity - I just love it!

I really wanted a large mantle for my focal wall in the front room so that I could make an immediate impact in the shop when changing out the seasons and holidays. I never could find one that was big enough, so on a whim, I put a call out to my vendors in the chance that maybe somebody had one sitting around I could buy. I got back better than that! Josh from Vinewood Home Creations came through with a mantle his father had built as a display........and it was 6 feet wide and almost 5 feet tall. Did I want to use it?? Well YES please! :)

His dad was nice enough to let us use it for the shop, and in exchange, we'll promote his custom mantles. Sounds like a win-win to me! 

So, I sat about gathering things to start creating a Halloween mantle, and made a call to my handy dandy room stylist vendor, Mary Runger (of Oh So Lovely) and told her to bring what she had in her plethora of goodies, and we'd see what we could pull together overnight. (And it WAS overnight - we finished at 3 am!)

 If you refer to the previous post, this wall is the one that had the pattern paper on it. I started removing the pattern paper from the wall, and after 5 hours (!), I ended up with a wall that had torn drywall all over it. Ugh. Too tired to fix it since it was already 8pm (and we opened at 10am the next morning), I just started covering it up for now. Then we started pulling all of our supplies together and started putting things up at random. That's how the creative mind works, you know. ;) Once we decided the direction we were going and had things pretty much in order, we realized we still had to paint the giant unfinished mantle......so around 11pm we pulled out the paint brushes and got to it.

We got it painted finally, secured it to the wall, and then started putting it all in place. Here's the finished mantle. I'll let the pictures tell the story of the theme....graveyard.

 

A dead bride in her casket.

 Since we are a retail shop, we threw in a jewelry display featuring owls and crosses.

 

 

 Locks and keys and chains. 

There's lots of great jewelry pieces in this great window cabinet.

If you're local (Nashville/Murfreesboro area), please come and check it out.

So, what do you think?

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Linking up to Transformation Thursday at The Shabby Creek Cottage
Saturday Night Special at Funky Junk Interiors