How do you incorporate your children into home décor projects without looking like your walls have been colored with crayons?

Simple: have your child do the broad strokes, while you fill in the details.

My daughter helped me with my new fall tablescape. Can you see where she helped? Okay, so the title of this post might be a hint...

She helped me make this table runner. We started with a burlap table runner, and then I started by painting some leaf outlines onto the runner. She helped me decide which color went where, and then she colored in all the leaves with acrylic craft paint.

We wanted it to look like leaves falling down, so we had more leaves “piled” at the bottom, with fewer and fewer fluttering to the ground as we went higher.

Once Lil Bit was done, the shapes looked “leafish”—that’s a word, right?—but it didn’t have that professional look we wanted. But that was okay, because this mom had a plan. After everything was dry, I added the details—in black sharpie marker. This was a simple way to add some fall flair to our dining room.

To round out the room, we used silk flowers in our glass tile embellished vase, with a LED faux candle illuminating the vase from this inside.


I used some of the porcelain and glass pumpkins I’ve had for years. We also reused several items that hadn’t seen the light of day in quite some time—cloth napkins and bamboo placemats anyone?


The baskets were from Michael’s clearance over a year ago, and the big urn in the back and the glass bowl are both Southern Living at Home products.



Those little glitter votives are super easy—I made them last year, and they had to make a reappearance to add some glitter and glitz to our dining room.

The mirror quote art is a project I did for My Favorite Finds--you won't believe how easy...and inexpensive it was!

Have you decorated your dining room for fall yet? Do you let your kids help? Remember, they don’t have to do the whole project—they just want to help!

Want to learn more about creating with kids? Check out the rest of the series here.