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There is a garage sale two blocks from my house every Saturday in September. Same driveway, same folding tables, same woman who will not budge on the price of anything ceramic. Last year I walked home with a candle for one dollar. The wick was so far gone I had to dig it out with a butter knife before it would take a flame. It then burned clean through all of October, so who won, really.
Here is what a few cheap autumns have taught me. The house does not know what anything cost. A pasta sauce jar with the label soaked off, three branches pulled off the maple out back, and the kitchen table suddenly looks styled. Meanwhile the fifty dollar ceramic pumpkin at the boutique does the same job as the paper one I printed at home for two dollars, except the paper one can be recycled in December instead of stored in a bin until I die.
So this is the cheap version of cozy. Thrifted, printed, taped, borrowed from the recycling bin. Every file below came from an indie design shop for a dollar or two, and a few of the links are affiliate links, meaning I get a small cut if you grab one and you pay the same either way. On we go.
The Porch Scene That Ended Up on a Jar
I do not own a sublimation printer. I want that on the record, because this is technically a 20oz tumbler wrap and I have never once put it on a tumbler. I printed the porch scene on plain paper, trimmed it, and wrapped it around a big washed-out sauce jar with double sided tape. Battery tealight inside, the kind the garage sale woman sells three for a quarter. It glows through the paper like a tiny lit window.
One catch. The wrap is sized for a skinny tumbler, so on a fat jar the seam does not quite meet. There is a half inch gap in my autumn. It faces the wall. Nobody has ever noticed and I will not be telling them.
One Wrap for the Coffee I Drink on the Steps
This one did make it onto an actual cup, sort of. I printed it on a clearance sheet of printable vinyl, a dollar fifty for the pack, and stuck it to a plain tumbler I already had from some conference years ago. It is not dishwasher proof. I hand wash it and drink my coffee on the front steps like a woman in a commercial, except my robe has a bleach stain.
Nitpick: the rust tones printed darker than the preview on that cheap vinyl, closer to brown. I actually like it better. Your inkjet may disagree with mine.
Napkin Rings Nobody Knows Were a Tumbler File
Confession, I bought four cloth napkins at that same garage sale for two dollars and they needed something. So I printed this wrap on 65 lb cardstock, sliced it into inch wide strips, looped them, glued the ends. Ten minutes. The pattern is busy enough that every strip looks deliberate, little pumpkins and porch railings marching around each napkin.
Because of where the pattern repeats, two of my strips came out all leaves and no pumpkin. I cut a second row and fussy-picked the good sections. Budget decorating is mostly just being willing to cut twice.
The Only One That Touched a Heat Press
My sister has the whole sublimation setup, the printer, the press, the shelf of blank tumblers she swears she will sell someday. Our arrangement is one pie per pressing. I brought her this file and a pumpkin pie in September and walked out with a finished tumbler that looks like it cost thirty dollars at a craft fair.
If you go this route, mind the seam. She lined it up in about forty seconds because she has done hundreds, but my first attempt at taping the wrap on was crooked enough that the porch in the design leaned like it had structural problems. Let the person with the press do the taping.
Harvest Clipart, Scissors, and a Jam Jar
This is a PNG set of harvest food and decor pieces, and I used it the least glamorous way possible. Printed a full sheet on copy paper, cut the elements out with kitchen scissors, and taped them around the kitchen window frame where I stand doing dishes. Pears and bread loaves and little bundles of wheat, at eye level, for the cost of one sheet of ink.
The leftovers became gift tags for the applesauce I jar every year. One nitpick, a couple of the smaller elements get muddy printed under an inch wide, so keep those ones bigger and give the tiny slots to the simple shapes.
A Two Dollar Bundle, a Fifty Cent Pillow Cover
The thrift store near me has a bin of plain pillow covers, fifty cents each, and this bundle is why I keep going back to it. I used iron-on transfer paper from the craft store, my regular inkjet, and my regular iron on the ochre design with the leaves. Twenty minutes start to finish and the couch got a new pillow for under three dollars total.
The trap with transfer paper is the shiny rectangle it leaves around the design if you do not trim close. My first pillow has a ghost border you can see when the afternoon light hits it sideways. Trim to the edge of the art. Learn from my pillow.
Round Two, Because I Ran Through the First Bundle
I went back for the second bundle in this series before September ended, which for a person on a strict decor budget is practically a scandal. This batch went onto a plain flour sack towel from the back of my own drawer, the sage design this time, ironed on a Tuesday night while something boiled over behind me.
Heads up that a few designs across the two bundles are close cousins, same wreath bones with different words. I do not mind, the towel and the pillow live in different rooms. But if you only want one bundle, open both preview images side by side first and pick your favorite half.
The Kids’ Table Runs on Kawaii Mushrooms
This clipart set is little smiling acorns and mushrooms and mugs, and my kid annexed it immediately. We printed a sheet and she cut them out herself, crooked, which is the correct way. They became labels for the gratitude jar, which is, of course, another sauce jar, washed, with a ribbon from an old gift bag tied around the neck.
A few also got taped into lunchbox notes through October. Only complaint is that the tiniest faces lose their little expressions if you print them under an inch tall. Size up. The smile is the entire point.
Caramel and White for the Room That Refuses Orange
My bedroom does not do orange. It is all cream and wood and it looks at a rust pumpkin the way my mom looks at my crooked banner tape. This caramel and white set is the answer, soft brown pumpkins and pale leaves that read autumn without shouting it. I strung a banner from cardstock scraps left over from three other projects, threaded on string that came wrapped around a package.
One thing, the white elements disappear on white cardstock, obviously, and I still printed them that way the first time. Kraft paper fixed it. The caramel on kraft might be my favorite cheap thing in the house right now.
A Door Sign with a Bow on It, Laminated with Packing Tape
The front door needed something and I was not paying twenty dollars for a wooden sign that says hello. This PNG is a pumpkin wearing a bow, which sounds silly and looks great, and I printed it big on 110 lb cardstock. Lamination budget: zero. I covered the whole thing in overlapping strips of packing tape, which is what my grandmother would have done, and it survived two rains on a covered porch.
Go slow with the tape or you get bubbles. Mine has one bubble, lower left, over a leaf. My partner pointed it out once and has been legally barred from the porch conversation since.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is farmhouse decor going out of style?
The version of it that was buffalo check on every flat surface has cooled off, sure. But warm neutrals, wood tones, jars, dried stems, that is not really a trend, that is just what houses looked like before we had words for it.
Also, and I say this with love, the woman at the garage sale does not check what is trending before she prices a crock at two dollars. Buy what you will still like in the spring. Skip the rest.
Can I print these at home?
Yes, that is the whole game here. Everything in this post came off my own inkjet, which is old enough that it makes a grinding noise before every job like it is clearing its throat.
For big full-color pieces like the door sign, the library printer is my move, about fifty cents a page and nobody has ever asked me why I am printing a pumpkin in a bow.
What file formats do these designs come in?
Mostly PNG and JPG, and some listings toss in an SVG. The PNGs are the workhorses for this kind of budget project because the background is transparent, so your cutouts and iron-ons do not come with a white box attached.
Check the individual listing before you buy, the format list is always right there. If a project needs cutting by machine you want that SVG, otherwise the PNG carries you.
Do I need a Cricut or Silhouette to use these?
No. I do not own either one. Every single project in this post was scissors, a craft knife once, and tape. A cutting machine makes the fiddly stuff faster and the edges cleaner, and if you already have one, great, the SVG files are there for you.
But the machine costs more than my entire autumn budget times ten. Scissors were fine. My kid’s crooked mushrooms were better than fine.
Before You Print
Total damage this year, if you are counting: about eleven dollars in files, four dollars at the garage sale, one pie to my sister, and whatever fraction of an ink cartridge I burned. The sauce jar was free. The branches were free. The candle with the archaeological wick was a dollar and it is still going.
Start with the jar, honestly. Soak the label off tonight, stick three branches in it, put it where you eat breakfast. If that little thing makes you happy tomorrow morning, print one file and see what happens.
