At Home Helps You Get Ready to Celebrate the Arrival of Summer

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At Home is a specialty retailer of home decor products with over 50,000 unique items, including furniture, garden, home textiles, housewares, patio, rugs, seasonal decor, tabletop décor, and wall decor. This means they specialize in pretty much everything you need for your home decor or party planning projects.

I’d never heard of At Home until recently, when a store opened in my area. When they say they’re a superstore, they’re not kidding! I easily spent two hours in the store on my first trip and I feel like I only saw half the store. I need to go back for a better look sometime when I have a babysitter for the day.

My goal for my first trip was to purchase items to use during the summer months. I wanted to have family and friends over to visit outside on my patio, which my husband and I are slowly trying to fix up.

If your patio furniture needs an update, At Home has an amazing selection of outdoor cushions and pillows, as well as patio umbrellas to provide shade. Mixing and matching the patterns is such a fun way to give my plain metal furniture a new look. They’re a little more money than what I was expecting, but the overall quality can’t be beat. When I invited friends over to visit outside, I couldn’t believe how comfy my old furniture was with the new cushions. We easily could have sat outside all day, had it not started raining and forced us inside! (I grabbed the watercolor flower pillows to take inside, since they’re nicer than my current couch pillows.)

My favorite thing I purchased during my trip was a metal folding side table with a pretty scroll pattern (shown in the second and third pictures on the bottom row of the above collage). It’s intended for outdoor use, but actually blends fairly well with my inside decor too. This is a great table for entertaining because it’s just the right size for storing snacks or games and activities. If you need baskets to keep everything organized, the white plastic basket shown on the tray table was just over $5 and is very sturdy.

At Home has a several oversized drink dispensers to choose from. These are very handy when you have lots of kids in your home, since you don’t need to worry about children spilling heavy jugs of juice or bottles of soda when they try to pour themselves a drink. I wanted one for entertaining, but I like it so much that I’m using it everyday now. (I fill it up with lemonade or fruit infused water and leave it in the refrigerator.)

Visit the At Home website to review their online merchandise selection and to find a store in your area.

Disclaimer: A gift card was provided by the manufacturer for the purpose of preparing this review.

Over the years I have shared a lot of pumpkin knitting patterns, and I’ve knit and crocheted a lot of pumpkins myself. But it feels like there are always more fun things to try with knit pumpkins, so this year I wanted to look a little more beyond basic stockinette or ribbed pumpkins and share some pumpkin patterns with cables, bobbles and colorwork.

In the cable collection we’ve got these cute little basic cable and ribbed pumpkins from Elly Bear Knits. There are two sizes that make a wide, flat pumpkin and a taller round pumpkin. Both are worked in the round as a tube that’s cinched top and bottom when you’re done, and they use bulky weight yarn.

Another cute cable pumpkin knitting pattern comes from Gray Bear Akswokrat. This one is knit flat and it looks like a chunky yarn but you could use other weights to make pumpkins of different sizes. This one also has an I-cord stem and uses yarn to cinch up the sections of the pumpkin, giving it a more natural look.

Add some bobbles to your pumpkins with this design from Autumn Shelter Makes. Also worked in the round in a tube, it features a repeating pattern of bobbles and uses yarn wrapped around the outside to make segments. This one looks like worsted weight yarn to me.

Of course there’s nothing that says your pumpkin has to be a single color, so let’s throw in some colorwork. I love the look of the Cozy Fall Pumpkin knitting pattern from South Stitch Girls. The little leather loop adds a rustic touch but you could also just add a stick. These pumpkins have five colorwork options and are worked in worsted weight yarn in the round.

There’s also the Autumn Fair Isle Trio pumpkins pattern from Equestriann Style, which has three different sizes of pumpkins with four colorwork designs. They are worked in super bulky yarn in the round and look good with high contrast or more muted color combinations.

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