Staff Picks- For the Love of Pumpkins

For the Love of Pumpkins by Sarah Marie Talley

This time I picked another Halloween inspiration book to get me ready for my favorite holiday. 🙂 This one caught my attention from the shelves because of the adorably carved pumpkins on the front, and because really who doesn’t love pumpkins at Halloween? The subtitle for this book is “A Visual Guide to Fall Decorating with Pumpkins and Ornamentals”. If you’re looking for exhaustive descriptions of how to recreate the ideas in the book, this isn’t the one for you. There are simple descriptions for each project, but the main focus of this book really is the pictures. (Thus the Visual Guide part, I guess.) And boy, the pictures really are worth it. There are some really adorable displays, and some very elegant ones, and some things I have never seen before and certainly couldn’t have brainstormed on my own! One of the prettiest and most unique ideas I saw in the book was probably the three-tiered pumpkin fountain. They accented the fountain with fresh bittersweet branches and the result was a lush, beautiful, harvest fountain.

As far as the text goes, there seems to be just enough to get you through the projects, but for those of us that sometimes need a little more of the step-by-step instructions, certain steps may leave us stumbling. There are recipes for the Thanksgiving portion of the book that are standard step-by-step fare though, and there is a very informative appendix in the back of the book that details all the different types of pumpkins and gourds found throughout the book. There’s also a lovely (but short) section at the beginning about the pumpkin process – from how the pumpkins are grown and harvested to how to select and care for your pumpkin. I really enjoy the layout of the book – there are often mosaics of pictures on each page, the photos themselves are all well-composed and eye-catching, and where there are blocks of text they fit in instead of breaking the flow of pictures.

All in all I would recommend this book to people looking for Halloween and other fall design ideas who are more visually inspired. If you are a more concrete builder, painstakingly following each direction to create your desired outcome, this is probably not the book for you. But even then, it’s certainly worth a look for the information on pumpkins and the gorgeous pictures!

Recommended by: Ashley at Main
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