Hello Autumn my old friend

Apparently someone got the message to Summer to get his lazy ass the hell out because Autumn's in the house and she's shutting off the heat and kicking the trees pretty hard.

Labor day is always our little signal that says "Okay, you can stop pretending you're normal for the neighbors and bring out the big guns."

Let the Halloweening commence!

I always like to start with the mantle, a nice microcosm of what the rest of the house will look like come late October.

With all students finally back in school, most stores have finally started to trade the notebooks and pencils for skulls and bleeding hearts. Which means it's that time of year when my husband and I do an unholy amount of shopping hitting every store we could possibly imagine would have anything ghoulish or macabre (You wouldn't believe the weird shit Jiffy Lube gets up to).

First order of business was to get a head finally for our gravedigger who shall henceforth be known as Doug.

I used the always neighbor friendly trick of duct taping up a halloween mask, hanging it on the line and filling it with spray insulation foam. It's probably a very good thing we have a privacy fence or I imagine there would be a revolving cop policy.

As I must post this disclaimer each time I make a head: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT PLAY WITH SPRAY INSULATION FOAM! If you can't get out of it then hire a gorilla or something, I'm still picking bits of flesh off and every time I think the head is done it oozes a bit more and my hands are covered again.

While my husband transformed various bits of PVC pipe into legs and an upper torso:

I made eyeballs for Doug. And since it's a skeleton mask they have to be blue.

But that wasn't the end of my body part painting for the weekend. I got some latex ears for my costume and of course they needed a bit of help to not only match my skin tone but also look like they had an ounce of realism somewhere in the back.

Now we come to the portion where I just show off things we found. First up, from the Martha Stewart Halloween collection (which still feels weird as hell to say but damn does she have some interesting quality shit).
The skeleton is old but I found this moon with bats and just had to have it. It's a moon silhouette!

Finally, because we own an insane dog who we're fairly certain would pass herself off Chicken Boo style as a person loves wearing sweaters. So we got her a new one to blend in with the season:

And that was my Labor day "Piss off Summer" extravaganza.