Everyone Hail to the Pumpkin Song

Happy Halloween!!!  This has been a quiet holiday for us.  No costumes (unless you count my cat-ear headband) and no parties (my Halloween-obsessed friend R is trying to sell her condo so no annual house of horrors).  However, we have engaged in some festive (and when compared to R's, boring) decorations.

We've also done up our porch for the trick-or-treaters with a variety of pumpkin artwork.  Here are our makeover candidates.

As if our kitchen wasn't orange enough already.

Here's Mr. flyskim designing his masterpiece.

The puking pumpkin was not my idea.  We can blame that on Mr. flyskim.  I carved the pumpkin on the ground looking horrified.  Because I really am, a little. 

 And here we have my haunted house pumpkin (thank you Martha).

We'll light them all up tonight, lock up the cats and hand out candy by the fistfuls.  I'm hoping the weather holds. Few things are worse than trick-or-treating in a rain storm.  Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderfully spooky Halloween.  I just need to put a second sleeve on Vogue 1193 and hem the skirt and sleeves.  I have great hopes of wearing my new dress to work Tuesday, so look for the post.

The Hungry Skeleton

 

 Last night, Mr. flyskim and I had our annual Halloween dinner at La Calaca Comelona in Southeast Portland.  This is, hands down, my favorite restaurant in Portland, and we don't eat here as often as I'd like.  This is the one exception I make to my boycott of spicy food, and I've never had a bad meal here.  From the moles to the enchiladas Morelianas (regional to Morelia, chicken and potato based and like no other enchilada you've ever eaten) to the chile relleno, everything is fresh and wonderfully made.  (Can you tell I'm not a food critic?  No descriptive abilities whatsoever.)  The old menu used to warn you that you were about to enjoy authentic regional Mexican cuisine (southern and central) and that you would not find burritos on the menu.  The restaurant is filled with pictures of Frida Kahlo and Day of the Dead images.

La Calaca Comelona means "The Hungry Skeleton" and, according to the restaurant's website, it "celebrates the traditional spirit of the dead that playfully makes its way into Mexican culture."  So, perfect for this time of year.  There is also an annual Day of the Dead Dinner on November 2nd with a fixed menu.  We've never attended, but I hear it's a blast.

Mr. flyskim would not let me take a picture of my meal (Levanta Muertos or Wake the Dead, a yummy combination of chicken, mushrooms, green peppers, onions, black beans and rice), so here's a picture of Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo. 

Trick or Treat (part 2)

My friend R calls Halloween her Christmas.  She starts decorating her home on October 1st and often needs that much time to get everything up and running.  She even has an extra storage unit to house all of her Halloween paraphernalia.  Her boyfriend even threatened to end things one year if she bought anymore Halloween decor.  When she realized that Halloween was on a Saturday this year, she pulled out all the stops.  We found this balanced on the top of our mailbox one evening when we got home from work (Mr. flyskim thought I had ordered something even though I was not supposed to be shopping at the time).

Unfortunately, R didn't think to require the finger for entry.  Here's the view that greeted you walking in the front door.

 

And the living room.

 

Yes, that's a giant eye on the screen.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of R's most recent addition in her studio because she had tarot readings going on in there, but it was a life-sized human figure wrapped in spiderwebs and suspended by his feet from a giant web complete with huge spider.  There were portraits that changed as you walked by them, crows perched on the curtain rods and bats hanging from every ceiling vent.  And I'm so used to the bathroom, that I forgot to take a picture of the dismembered corpse and the sound activated rat in a trap behind the toilet. I did, however, get a great picture of R in her Black Widow costume.

And of our friend M as Wonder Woman and sister-in-law V as an angel.  Brother-in -law G-man )(not pictured) was a Ghostbuster.

And here's Mr. flyskim at the buffet.
 

Behind him you see Jack Sparrow's younger, better-looking brother.  At least that's what we were told.  I should have taken more pictures.  I usually do, but we were having too good a time.  Next year, R is talking about getting a low-lying fog machine.  I guess it's never too early to start planning.  I hope you all had a great holiday.  Now, onward to Thanksgiving!

Trick or Treat (part 1)

So, marked lack of updates around here, but there has been work accomplished and visible progress.  And a vacation, if I'm being generous.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The really big news is that I finished something!!!  A couple of somethings, and just in time for Halloween (which is good because when else could Mr. flyskim and I freely walk the streets as Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter?).

 Aren't we cute? 

(Please ignore any accidental resemblance to Alice from The Brady Bunch on my part.)

My dress was a combination of McCall's 5800 and the sleeves from Simplicity 2854.  I used a blue polyester suiting in a linen-like weave that I got at Joann's on sale.  There were some fitting issues because I figured that this was a costume, so it didn't need to be perfect, but that was my first mistake.  Then again, I'm not short, but I'm not particularly tall, either, so how was I supposed to suspect that the pattern waistline was 1 1/2 inches too high?  By making the bodice of the dress, trying it on and admiring my new belly shirt, that's how.  So I added a waistband and problem solved.  I also had to take in the shoulders 1 1/2 inches, but by the time I made that decision, I had already installed the bodice lining and my fear of damaging the loose weave fabric (or laziness) prevented me from taking it out when I fixed the shoulder seams.  As a result, the excess bodice lining is just tacked down.  Seriously?  I had to take the sleeves out to make the shoulder adjustment (don't think I didn't try to avoid that, too) and was already panicking about how I was going to put them back in, so the lining was a minor consideration.  And it didn't show from the outside which was a bonus.

And don't talk to me about the zipper.  I'm usually pretty good with them, but I made the mistake of trying to wing it instead of following my usual instructions and had to take out the first attempt (super messy).  However, I had shortened the top of the zipper, so I couldn't key it properly when I put it back in, and the top doesn't line up and the waistband seams don't match.  I did mark the zipper where there were seams, but that didn't work out so well for me this time.  If this had been a real garment, I would have taken it out as many times as I needed to get it right.  Scout's honor.

The pinafore, Butterick 4087, was relatively straightforward with a few minor changes and was completed at 1:44 a.m. on the 31st.  I haven't inspected my work on it very closely because I was a little loopy from the lack of sleep when I made it, but it didn't fall apart and looked right, so I consider that a win.

And these are the best Alice boots ever with their topsy-turvy buckles.

I used the Threadbanger tutorial for my masterpiece, the Mad Hatter's hat inspired by Tim Burton's Mad Hatter.  The instructions were generally good, but I would like to add a couple of things for clarity.  For the base fabric for the body of the hat, you need to some stretch, so use a fabric that already has some or cutting your material on the bias.  It is never mentioned on the tutorial, and I lucked into figuring it out by accidentally starting to attach the fabric at the bottom of the hat rather than at the top as instructed.  In order to get the fabric to fully cover the hat, I had to pull it onto the bias.  Also, the top layer of lace (there are two) had some stretch (you can see this better below).  Without the stretch, you won't get the curved shaping at the top of the hat.  Also, use a fabric that matches your hat for the brim.  While the spray paint made the brim stiff, it also slightly altered the shape, and the stiffness of the brim meant the it wouldn't stay when it was reshaped.

Some additional details:  the hatband matches the base fabric of the hat, and the hat pins are beads and feathers attached to floral wire.  I also used floral tape on the feather pin.

For the rest of Mr. flyskim's costume, we picked up a pair of brown pants and an eggplant-colored shirt from Goodwill and a brown jacket with gold stripes and a patterned vest from Red Light Clothing Exchange on Hawthorne.  I shortened the pants and lengthened the sleeves on the jacket by adding brown corduroy cuffs and lace and embellished the jacket collar and lapels with leftover fabric from the hat.  The fabric I originally zeroed in on for the scarf turned out to be $119.99 a yard, and while I love Mr. flyskim with all my heart, this wasn't happening.  The fabric I used isn't a great substitute for the one on Johnny Depp, but I was going for an interpretation rather than an exact reproduction.  This also looked pretty spiffy with the rest of the costume.

Mr. flyskim decided at the last minute to do the makeup (he was too late making up his mind to also go for the hair).  This was the palest foundation I could find at the drug store powdered lightly with cornstarch.  The cheap stuff from the Halloween section just flakes off and makes you itch.  As you can see from the pictures, he turned out pretty ghostly.

So, this all begs the question, where did we have to be that we put this much effort into one night?  One pretty damn impressive Halloween bash at our friends' house.  Tune back in tomorrow for Trick or Treat (Part 2) for more details.