Fancy Pants Kitchen: Tribute to LAM

This post is near and dear to my heart. I will start it off with my Halloween cookies which were brushed with edible tempera before baking and then decorated with royal icing. That, however, concludes the food portion of this post.

My dear departed Dad (LAM), had a Halloween tradition of scaring the bejeezus out of the neighborhood kids when we were growing up. All of his props were home made (this was well before the days of animatronics) he would use dry ice and build his own sets & make his own costumes. It was always something we looked forward to for months. And the best coming of age rite was being old enough to stay home and help scare the neighborhood kids instead of going out trick-or-treating!
My older brother (LAMII) has been building upon the traditions for decades – yes, I said decades, even enlisting his own son – LAMIII! LAMII, however has taken it to new heights with technology as you can see here in this video:

LAMII Halloween 2010

In past years I have dressed up and done small Halloween things for the trick-or-treaters but having lived mostly in apartments or gated communities, the effort would have been wasted. This year, however, I live in a suburban neighborhood ripe for haunting! I told hubby that I wanted to do a mini-haunted house and that’s all it took to get the ball rolling.
By now you know that I did a piece on Spirit Halloween for my City Sleuth show on local cable: City Sleuth and that got my ideas rolling but we didn’t have years worth of Halloween props & we had to be careful on the budget so off I went in search of deals!
Gerald gave us a roll of corrugated paper stone wall that we used to paper the main entry way and hubby even built a frame to enclose the area, which we also papered with the faux stone

I also trekked to the Dollar store for all sorts of props and came up with a bunch of flimsy headstones. Hubs, being the handy guy that he is had to go me one better and bought some thick styrofoam at Home depot along with some simulated stone spray paint and turned my little Dollar store purchase into truly cool headstones by cutting out the shapes, painting & then gluing my purchases onto them!

It also happened that the new neighbor had bought a bed and was about to recycle the box, when we swooped in and took it for our own. It became this casket (my work, not hubby’s!) with a little tape & black spray paint and another of those Dollar store headstones. The fingers creeping out of the casket were also Dollar store finds that we attached with wire & duct tape. After all, duct tape fixes everything.

In this photo you can also see the ‘blood’ streaked lanterns that we placed around the room on the walls – these were a summer’s end Superstore find for less than 2 bucks each that we painted black & of course, added our own blood. We used all LED candles for the inside. The lenticular photos we got at Wal-Mart & the Dollar store and added a bunch of little spot lights from – you guessed it – the Dollar store!
The candelabra behind the casket was a real find! I was at Gale’s florist here in regina, which also doubles as a craft store with much better prices than Michael’s. They had lots of Halloween goodies, like the gel blood splatters & fake knives for under a buck but I was looking for creepy candle sticks. So I asked. As luck would have it the owner told me she was throwing away two very large gothic candelabras and if I took them I would save her a trip to the dump! SCORE! These things added the perfect touch when fitted with LED candles and strewn with spider webs.
Then of course, you need creepy pumpkins – so I downloaded a pumpkin pattern and off I went. It was nice that Superstore had pumpkins on sale for less than 3 bucks each – any size!

We couldn’t get video of the inside since it was so dark but I do have video from outside and some pics from inside. The tunnel we got from Spirit Halloween – it was an instore prop that they let us tear down & cart away a couple of days before Halloween. The neighbors sure were surprised to see it go up!! The music in the video was some creepy classical that I downloaded from iTunes & then edited to add my own sound effects. We piped it outdoors and had it playing inside as well.