Make an indoor Fall Reading Retreat in your home

We don’t exactly get a Norman Rockwell fall here in Southern California, and I miss it. I came up with this idea to make it feel like fall in my apartment and… the results were mixed. It made a nice, cozy little space, but there’s a freakin’ sunlit palm tree ten feet outside my window, so it really didn’t look the way I wanted. However, it should work beautifully if you live in a region that has changing leaves, gray skies and temperatures cool enough for a fire.

My fantasy of a fall evening is to sit with a cup of something warm and read. Whether you read, knit, work a jigsaw puzzle or just chat with someone, this is a great way to feel like you’re outside without leaving the warmth of your home.

• Find a few square feet of your living room, breakfast nook, etc., with a window that has a nice view of the outdoors.
• Put a small table and two chairs that look autumnal to you (rustic, dark wood, etc.) in front of the window. If you don’t already have such a table/chair and don’t want to spend hundreds buying them, there are lots of alternatives.
  • Drape a cheap folding card table with scrap fabric with a pattern in fall colors. Drape some inexpensive chairs with solid fabric in a color found in the table’s fabric.
  • Put two short, matching bookshelves opposite one another (one facing the window, the other facing into the room) and balance a large block of wood over them. Now you have a table that shelves books or magazines to read – or your knitting, or whatever you want to do here. It looks a little tacky at this point, so you can either drape the whole thing with fabric, leaving only the books exposed, or you can paint it a nice fall color.
  • If you can get hold of wooden orange crates and stack them in place of the bookshelves, even better.
• Decorate your space with gourds, fall flowers, or Kaboose’s Nature Luminary Candle Holders – a DIY project that attaches beautiful fall leaves to a candle holder so it feels even more like you’re outside. You could also glitter some fall leaves and lay them around the table or hang them nearby. If, like me, you don’t have a spectacular fall and will instead find a rather unromantic palm tree ten feet out the window (sigh!), make leaf window clings that stick to your window without adhesive and peel right off whenever you’re ready. A fall Treasure Box would make a lovely centerpiece. That tutorial is intended for kids, but grown-ups could easily adapt it to be more sophisticated. Or not!

Now you can relax and sip and read, or whatever it is you like to do in fall evenings. You could knit a shawl (try this one, or search for a different pattern online) or a scarf – try this one or this one . You could work on other crafts, do the crossword, finally read the paper, or even knock out annoying tasks like the bills in a nicer atmosphere than usual.