With fall practically on our doorstep, now is the perfect time for a repurposed owl fall project.

Your front door is the perfect place to spread some festive fall fun, and I’m so excited to share this project with you so you can create your own version for your own front door.

In the past I’ve shared several fall door wreath projects, but this season I’m going in a completely different direction,

For some reason, when I think of fall one of the things that comes to my mind is owls.

No idea why, but hey… why not? lol.

Like with my repurposed grater owl wind chime,  for this project I went through my stashes looking for things that I could use.

Here’s what I came up with to create this repurposed owl door decoration.

A 9″ x 12″ aluminum baking pan, an orange winter scarf, 2 jello molds, 2 wooden tote bag handles, 2 silver plate forks, 2 misc hardware pieces, 1 silver plate spoon that was already bent back, a pair of faux pearl earrings, a tea strainer, and a 5″ x 8″ wooden plaque.

These are the thrifted finds that I used.

There’s a tool supply list near the end of this post, so be sure to check that out.

DIY Repurposed Owl Door Decoration

The first thing to do is mark where you want the eyes to be.

I did this by placing my molds where I wanted them and poking through the holes with a marker.

The patterns of these two jello molds are slightly different, as is the size… but that doesn’t matter in the least.

I think little funky things like that just make projects more interesting. At least to me.

Repurposing is all about using what you have or what you can find on the cheap, so never worry about being matchy matchy.

No need for a drill here because the aluminum pan is so easy to hammer a nail through.

Next I wrapped this beautiful orange scarf around the baking pan.

This scarf is so pretty, and it’s one of my favorite crafting scarves.

I thrifted it for $1 a few years back, and I never saw one like it before that and haven’t seen one since.

I’ve used it several times for past fall projects like this faux pumpkinseed repurposed scarf wreath, and this repurposed scarf fall frame project.

I don’t want to damage the scarf so I simply clipped it together at the back with binder clips to hold it in place. Easy peasy.

This way I can easily take my repurposed owl apart and reuse the scarf in other fall projects in the future.

Putting My Repurposed Owl Together

To attach the jello molds to the baking pan I put a brass fastener through the hole in the bottom of the jello molds…

… and then through the baking pan.

These brass fasteners are so cool because you just put them through and then press each end in opposite directions.

My jello molds aren’t very heavy so these fasteners worked just fine for this.

Here you can see both eyes in place.

I wanted my owl to have some eyebrows so I put these two miscellaneous pieces of hardware in place.

Then I punched a hole through the baking pan for each, again just using a large nail and hammer.

Then I used brass fasteners again to poke through the baking pan.

To hold the silver plate soon in place for the nose I hammered a hole on each side of the spoon.

Then I used a small piece of copper wire to hold the spoon in place.

After my fasteners and copper wire were all nice and tight I used E6000 to glue faux pear earrings into the jello molds and a tea strainer into the spoon.

Now my owl is starting to take shape, but for me an owl needs feet.

So I used some pliers to bend the tines on two thrifted silver plate forks.

I used silver plate because it’s much easier to bend than stainless steel, but you might have stronger hands than me.

The two forks are tucked up under the scarf and held in place with E6000 glue and good old duct tape, which holds them in place until the glue has cured. I decided to just leave the duct tape in there afterwards too.

Creating Chalkboard Sign for Repurposed Owl

I thought it would be fun for my repurposed own to have a sign, and what’s better than a chalkboard sign.

Originally I was planning on using chalkboard spray paint, but I found a perfect sized piece of chalkboard vinyl in my stash.

Using a pencil I outlined the wooden plaque on the back of the vinyl.

After I removed the backing and placed the chalkboard vinyl on my plaque I outlined it with jute twine using E6000 glue.

Hanging My Repurposed Owl 

Because I used a baking pan as the main body the back of my repurposed owl is hollow so I needed a creative way to hang this baby up.

In my hardware stash I found this lock piece. When used with a lock it would be placed vertically, but for my purpose here it had to be horizontal.

I just used a hammer and small nail to start the holes and then secured it with two little screws.

On the baking pan I hammered a hole into the middle of the top, right near the edge and I fed a long machine screw through it.

Then I used a nut so it will stay nice and tight. The screw will slip into the lock piece on the door.

For my two tote bag handle wings I cut a couple of command strips to make them a little shorter.

After I hung my repurposed owl in place I applied the wings right to the door.

I could have spray painted the wings orange, but I really like the way the brown stands out against the aqua blue front door.

Next it’s on to the owl’s feet.

They need to be grabbing a branch so I went into my vintage tools stash and found a rasp that was the perfect size, and I just tucked it in place.

To actually use a branch would be too literal for me, and I love using my vintage tools in projects.

The fork tines are curled enough to hold the rasp branch in place.

I used some pieces of chain to hang the chalkboard sign. The top links of the chain hang from the owl’s outside toes.

To finish up the top of the sign I glued on a simple jute twine bow and a cute little pumpkin.

As mentioned above here’s the list of tools that I used in this project.

So what do you think of my repurposed owl with hanging chalkboard sign?

I’ve decided to call him Owliver. 🙂

If you don’t care about protecting the scarf that you use, like I do, you could certainly glue everything together with a glue gun.

That would be quicker.

But I love the challenge of creating things that can easily be taken apart, and I tend to want to create something new each fall anyway.

Owliver is on the outside of our kitchen door, which is the main door we use everyday, and my quick and easy fall wreath is on the inside.

Since I’m a classic rock girl my hubby came up with the quote for the sign. It’s a play on the song “Who Are You?”, by The Who.

Considering this is on our front door, and visitors will see it when they knock… I think it’s perfect.

And we really do want to know hoot they are. lol.

Thanks so much for reading, and until next time…

keep on keepin’ on!

XOX

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