A Bright and Beautiful Day at Stein's

It's time for this year's Stein's post! What a beautiful day to take photos. The sky was a bright blue and cloudless. That blue always looks good with the orange pumpkins and decorations.  After this many years taking photos there, I know the weather conditions that look best with the displays!

Many of the ceramic pumpkins I've shared in the past were there, but there were some slight variations. 

The fence they always have up looks fitting with the Halloween decorations. 

I think this jack-o-lantern was new. He's on a stand, and my guess is that's for fire hazard reasons. Maybe you could have live flames in this more safely with it off the ground.

You might remember these ceramic jack-o-lantern pots too.

It's been so hot here that I felt lucky to photograph the pumpkins before they rotted away. They were getting near rotty as it was. I took these pics at the end of September, by the way. So it's hard to say how much longer some of these gourds lasted. It would be no problem as far as the temps being too hot right now! 

Pie pumpkins: 

Check out those stems! 

This pic was my computer wallpaper for awhile.  

Little ghost pumpkin. I think the slightly larger, fully round ones are Caspers.

There were many pretty mums as expected, but I feel like there were more colors out this year.

And some were in these pots you might remember. Every year I say I want to DIY these, but I'm not sure where I'd find the basic pots.

These flowers were new to me. They are Osteospermum. I've seen photos of Osteospermum online, but they were all light purple. This is the first time I'd seen these flowers in person and the first time I'd seen them in yellow in any way. They're called "Blue Eyed Beauty".  The very center is blue. I know at first it looks like they should be called Purple Eyed Beauty. 

They had beautiful straw flowers out! This one was my wallpaper before the yellow and orange pumpkins.

It's always fun to see the autumn floral arrangements with the decorative cabbage and peppers. These peppers look like crazy carrots or fingers to me. 

Aren't seasonal window displays fun? 

They added some new decorations this year, like this scarecrow.

So, venturing in the store here... Look who was there greeting us at the entrance! I think they named him Willy the Werewolf. 

His eyes came alive, I think in some motion sensor way. They look like maybe LED?

This is a ghost. It may be hard to tell because it has a lot of angles. It changed colors and I think it would be really pretty in the dark. 

The flasher...

Boo!

How cute are these? I like candy corn decorations so much more than the actual candy.

This towel was maybe my favorite item in the store. It reminds me of a design off a vintage candy bag. You know those little paper bags for Halloween treats?

And how great is this! Stein's had a Merry Christmas one of these out last year. Just picture it in neon red and green. These signs are pretty large and I imagine they'd look great on the side of a house or building. 

So there we have it! Another fun trip to Stein's for Halloween. My next blog post will be about all the Halloween decorations I've seen around town. I've been impressed with how DIY they've been. It's entertaining for me to see all that creativity. And it's fun to be surprised with unpredictable displays. 🦇

Stein's Halloween 2023

Time for this year's trip to Stein's! They had a few new ceramic pumpkins this year. I think this one looks especially wicked, at least at the angle I photographed it.

You can see in this view that some of them are cut-out in the back, so a person could put lights in there. I really like how this pic turned out with the rusty orange fence and pumpkins contrasted against that almost periwinkle blue sky.

Always cute!

This one looks pretty similar to a snowman, especially with that top hat. 

These little guys were the new ones. I actually saw these mini pumpkins at a local grocery store too.

I like their new cart. This scene looks like the cover of a country home type magazine.

There were of course many pumpkins. With the very high temps we've had this fall, some of them had actually started to rot.

Another contrast of colors I really like:

There were bins full of all kinds of little pumpkins.

Stein's still had a pretty good fall floral section going. The Blanket Flower:

Of course we're all seeing lots of mums around at this time of year.

Coreopsis: 

These colorful corn kernels were a lot of fun to photograph. I probably took more corn photos than anything else and had to winnow them down for this blog post. 

Those orange designs within each kernel! Just beautiful. 

Those little red peppers have a way of showing up in floral displays at this time of year.

These were labeled as little peppers too, but I don't know... I guess looking at that black one on the end, I can see it. At first they look like berries.

Every year I see these cute planters and try to think of a way to DIY one. It looks easy enough to do if I could find a basic pot like this to paint on. 

I love window displays, especially those with a Halloween theme! Don't they just welcome you into a store?

This giant metal rooster is great. I actually saw a similar, smaller rooster like this on someone's porch this past summer. 

Inside the store, there were a few aisles filled with Halloween goodies. If you can believe it, they actually had more space dedicated to Christmas merchandise. They even had the fake Christmas trees up already! 

This pillow design is so random. Black cats in a Halloween VW bus? 

This shelf gives you an idea of how this store is organized. They put together really nice color matched areas. So the Christmas shelves are all icy white and blue together or all red and white together. You get the idea. You see the little orange dog ghosts?

Love these pillows! They're so vintage looking. 

And, a nice message to end with. Hope you guys enjoyed this trip to Stein's! 🎃