Home Style: Halloween decorations you can easily scare up
22.09.11
Scaring up a cosmopolitan Halloween look at home is easy when you use your imagination and have the well tools.
Many of the ideas here I've presented before — and certainly sustain repeating.
If you use kitschy Halloween props like skeletons and "dismembered" torso parts in your décor, don't overdo it. For instance, one Halloween I wanted to give guests a surprise when they stepped onto my porch, so I reclined a skeleton on the chaise and put a imitation of one of my books in its hands.
Another year, I placed scrim-covered skeletons in the hotelman and hostess chairs in my dining room, positioning them like they were in danger of for a ghoulish dinner.
But perhaps my favorite display to date was last year's, when we strew-painted some mannequin legs and arms black and stuck them in the floral displays on my dining tabular and on my porch. Black iron urns made the perfect vases for this bloodcurdling aroma.
For less outlandish displays that are still lots of fun, put a black skull encrusted with glitter in the thwack bowl or on a cake plate. Or let a skeleton hand rebuff the salt and pepper shakers.
Source: The Seattle Times
County Fair shows there's an art to collecting
18.09.11
THE L.A. County Pretty good is known for new
foodstuffs and new thrills - but new words?
They've coined one at the Millard Sheets Center for the Arts: eclections. "Eclections: The Art of Collections" is the name of the exhibit this year, which spotlights collectors and their collections.
Funny books, marbles, toy robots, lunch boxes and salt shakers are among the items on flaunt. Also, buttons, toy trucks, etched glass, hand fans - and more.
"If you look at the whole of it, it's very eclectic," Tony Sheets, the center's numero uno and the son of its founder, told me. "That's where `Eclections' came from: eclectic collections."
Got it. Now release it to Webster's.
"Eclections" is a collection of collections, a meta-concept that makes me believe of Kramer's coffee table book about coffee tables on "Seinfeld."
The Sheets Center is the museum-like edifice by Gate 1. Inside the entrance, license plates for each articulate are affixed to a giant map. Nearby are tether cars, a pastime with which
Source: Inland Valley Daily Bulletin