Halloween projects

Okay, I know that I'm blogging about my October projects in November, but:

a.) I've been too busy.
b.) I've been too lazy.
c.) I've been too uninspired.
d.) I've been too shy.

Anyway, you get to hear about it now.

Now the head slapdasher is not very fond of Barbie (much to her father's pleasure), not because the lady's a tramp, but because she's mainstream culture, and we like to be a tad counter-culture here.

So, when scouting for an easy princess costume, we found a pretty dress up dress with a Babie cameo on sale, we said, "Que gonga!" and snapped that puppy up.  Then, amidst much dissent from Chicken Lu, we hacked off that Barbie's head, and sewed on some cool pink flowers.

What a pretty butterfly princess!

Also, we aren't quite sure why families wait until Christmas to do all the fun crafts, but we see no reason why we can't start having our graham cracker house fun a little early.

We were going to make a replica of our new old home, which we didn't decorate for Halloween for fear that we would terrify all the neighborhood children and have to eat all the Reese's, Snickers and Milky Ways ourselves (oh wait--we did that too!), but then a Reformation Day brain wave struck and we did the Wittenberg church instead.

Happy Reformation Day/Halloween/Birthday Button!

Dining room improvements

We've been slapdashing our way to a prettier Dining Room here in Deeretown.

The lovely stained oak trim (original to our fancy-dancy home) has been twisting my brain up for months. Accustomed to cheap fiber board painted white, I was befuddled as to what color to paint the walls after we got rid of the dark maroon faux faux-painted wallpaper. What could I paint it that would lighted up our naturally dark room (which is also confusing: it faces south and west, and has large windows on both of those sides)? I went with my default color: light, light yellow. Though this same color looks just like what it is in the hall and stairway, in the dining room, this ended up looking like cream.

Back to the drawing board.

I ragged off a wall in our previous home in the now discontinued Ralph Lauren Duchesse paint (scored on the returned paint discount rack at Home Depot for $5) and loved it for as long as we lived there. Now Ralph Lauren has both a more subtle paint (Candlelight) and more not-subtle paint (Metallic).  Since the Metallic paint would have the exuberance of a Great Dane puppy, and we here at the SlapDashery prefer to be more adult Golden Retrieveresque, I went with the candelight, slapped it up on the wall, and was bored.

That night, I went down to the basement to practice with the wealth of paint leftover from all the painting jobs done in our house since 1920--seriously. I found a lot of sludge, and one can of "Latte" that was used in our living room. While the color is a little dark for my tastes, I thought, meh, let's try it in a color wash. Bella!

This morning, I tried the Candlelight over my latte color wash, and got just the blend I was looking for: grownup, but with a sneaky touch of hyper.

Just like us!

Next up: what to do with the strangers in these frames.