9 cozy ways to romanticize fall, make the season feel magical, and create an autumn you’ll actually remember.
Autumn is short. For reasons beyond my comprehension, we are given only 13 weeks of golden leaves, crisp mornings, warm drinks, open windows, and “measure with your heart” amounts of cinnamon. Which is entirely too short, in my opinion, to spend any of it behaving reasonably.
So if you’ve been longing for the kind of autumn that feels a little like stepping into a favorite book…full of old books and warm tea, baking and wandering, raucous laughter, memories, and just a touch of absurdity, consider this your field guide to an unreasonably romantic autumn.
Watch: A Field Guide to an Unreasonably Romantic Autumn
This little film is my cinematic love letter to autumn: a collection of ideas for making the season feel a little more magical, memorable, and wonderfully unreasonable.
And if you’d rather keep reading, make yourself something warm and let’s begin.
1. Look the Part
The autumn romantic can usually be identified by her knitwear.
Preferably in some combination of rust, moss, brown, cream, and a shade of orange she insists is identical to the leaves outside.
There is something about getting dressed for the season that makes an ordinary day immediately feel more special.
And no, I do not mean ordering an entirely new autumn wardrobe.
That would be far too reasonable. Instead, go rummaging through your own closet.
Pull out the sweater you forgot you owned. The old boots. The scarf that only emerges for three months of the year. The earrings a friend gave you. The cardigan that is probably still slightly too warm for the weather but which you are determined to wear anyway.
If we’re going to spend the next few months wandering through crunchy leaves, drinking tea, and eating things containing entirely too much cinnamon, we might as well dress for the occasion.
2. Take Your Book Outside
This sounds very reasonable. Which is why we must immediately make it less so. First, locate a particularly lovely patch of autumn. Spread out a blanket. Then bring not one book, but a full stack. Five or six seems appropriate.
Make tea or coffee, preferably served in a cup that has absolutely no business being outdoors, and settle in.
You do not actually have to read very much. Read a chapter. Read three pages. Drink your tea. Listen to the leaves moving overhead. The point is simply to be there.
There are only so many afternoons each year when the air is cool, the trees are beautiful, and you can sit outside with a real book in your hands while the whole world feels magical around you.
3. Make Something From Scratch
Autumn has a peculiar ability to convince otherwise rational people that they should spend four hours making something they could purchase at the grocery store for $3.99. I support this completely.
For me, autumn lives in the kitchen. Cinnamon. Cloves. Brown sugar. Apples. Pumpkin. Butter melting in a pan. Bread baking in the oven. There are certain smells that seem capable of changing the entire atmosphere of a house.
Before you begin, I recommend making an unreasonably long autumn baking list.
Fill it with breads, pastries, apple things, pumpkin things, cinnamon things, recipes you’ve bookmarked for three years, and at least one item wildly more complicated than anything you normally make.
Ideally, the list should be considerably longer than autumn itself.
A few suggestions to start:
4. Play Like Your Heart Depends on It
Somewhere along the way, adults become extremely good at being productive.
We answer emails. Clean kitchens. Make appointments. Get everyone where they need to be. And somewhere in all that responsibility, I think many of us forget how to play. So this autumn, I am making a formal recommendation:
Play like your heart depends on it.
Run through the leaves. Get dirty. Roll down a hill. Build a ridiculously large leaf pile. Find a cardboard box and slide down a hill like you did when you were eight.
Collect the biggest, crunchiest leaf you can find for absolutely no practical reason. Joy does not have to accomplish anything in order to be worthwhile.
5. Become a Beginner
Autumn also seems to give people an extraordinary amount of confidence around craft supplies. We should take advantage of this.
Choose one thing you have always wanted to learn, especially something that feels slightly intimidating.
Anything you’ve looked at and thought: I could never do that. Excellent. Do that one.
For me, it’s bookbinding. The idea of deliberately taking apart a perfectly good book is admittedly horrifying, and I have approximately zero qualifications. Which is sort of the point. There is something wonderful about being bad at something. No expectations. No pressure to turn it into a business.
There are few better ways to make a season memorable than learning something you didn’t know how to do before.
6. Establish Autumn Headquarters
This one is especially for the mothers, caretakers, and anyone whose home sometimes feels as though every square inch belongs to somebody else.
Find a little corner that belongs to you.
It can be a chair beside a window. A tiny writing desk. One shelf. A basket next to your favorite chair. Even a tray you pull out when you have half an hour to yourself.
Claim it. Put your book there. Leave your half-finished project out. Add a little lamp. Whatever makes that little space feel unmistakably like you. Your hobbies deserve a place in your life, too. You will be surprised how quickly one tiny corner can become somewhere you genuinely look forward to sitting.
And I think every autumn romantic deserves a headquarters.
7. Go Into the Field
At some point, naturally, we have to take this field guide into the field.
Autumn feels like an invitation to wander. Take the long way home simply because the trees are beautiful. Visit the little town you’ve driven past a hundred times. Find a trail you’ve never walked. Pick apples. Stop for coffee somewhere new. Turn down the road you always wondered about.
I suggest three rules for your autumn expedition:
The Autumn Adventure Rules
1. No itinerary.
2. Find something you’ve never seen.
3. Come home with a story.
Give yourself an afternoon in which you do not need to accomplish anything. Autumn is, after all, a season of letting go. Perhaps we can practice letting go of the itinerary, too.
8. Record Your Findings
No respectable field guide would be complete without field notes. So when you get home, write something down. Not in a serious journal that requires a thoughtful entry every single evening.
Absolutely not.
We are creating a no-pressure, not-daily, doesn’t-even-have-to-last-past-autumn junk journal.
Save the scraps of the season you don’t want to lose:
- A receipt from the little coffee shop.
- A photograph.
- A pressed leaf.
- A ticket.
- A recipe.
- A wrapper from something delicious.
Then write a few things down:
- A funny thing one of your children said.
- A list of the books you read.
- The first really cold morning.
- The best thing you ate.
- Something you saw that made you stop.
No profound reflection required.
I made some little autumn stickers and printable pieces for my own field notes, and you’re welcome to use them too.
[DOWNLOAD THE FREE AUTUMN PRINTABLES AT THE LINK BELOW →]
How to Use the Printables with Cricut Print Then Cut
Want your Cricut to cut everything out for you? Here’s the quick version:
- Open a blank canvas in Cricut Design Space and upload the printable.
- Choose Flat Graphic as the image type and add it to your canvas. You can repeat steps 1 and 2 to add several graphics to your canvas. If you want to print them all one one page, select them all, right click and select “attach”.
- Resize as needed, then make sure the design is set to Print Then Cut.
- Click Make, then follow the prompts to print from your home printer. I turn off “add bleed” – but that’s up to you and your printer on what looks better. I recommend doing a test print first.
- Place the printed sheet on your Cricut mat and load it into your machine.
- Select the material you printed on (e.g. vinyl, cardstock) and let your Cricut cut out the designs.
For stickers: Print on printable sticker paper and choose the closest sticker-paper material setting in Design Space. For traditional peel-off stickers, you want a kiss cut that cuts through the sticker layer but leaves the backing intact.
For cardstock: Print on white cardstock (I like a nice, sturdy cardstock for journaling pieces), then select the appropriate cardstock weight in Design Space. The Cricut will cut all the way through, giving you individual pieces you can glue or tape into your journal.
Tip: When your printer dialogue opens, choose the highest-quality print setting available for richer colors and sharper details. 🍂✂️
9. Gather Your Fellow Romantics
Autumn is much too lovely to keep entirely to yourself.
So gather a few fellow romantics. Host an autumn tea party, such as this one. Plan a bookish afternoon. Have a craft night. Invite everyone over for soup and bread. Watch an old movie. Make something together.
And whatever you do, I am going to have to insist that you exercise absolutely no restraint while planning it. Make the inspiration board. Go thrifting for the decorations. Dream up the menu. Print your own invitations.
Tie unnecessary ribbons around things. You know. Normal autumn behavior.
Your Autumn Field Assignment
Before you leave, choose three things:
🍂 One thing you’ve never done before.
🍂 One thing that makes you feel like a kid again.
🍂 One thing you’ve been looking forward to all year.
Put them on the calendar. Tell someone you love. And then actually go do them.
Go forth, fellow romantics, and make an autumn worth remembering.
Leave a Reply