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Black N White Scary Centerpiece

HALLOWEEN

Do you notice the trend where dining rooms are getting less and less used?  It’s kinda getting phased out.  It’s like special occasion space.  Or storage for my nice stuff space.  Not really an everyday space anymore.  We barely use ours but I am trying to come up with a strategy to change that.  I like dining rooms…probably because I am a really messy cook.  Why dirty three pans with dinner prep when you can dirty thirteen?!  And if I can get people far away from my overflowing sink of dirty dishes (nothing is less appetizing than food spilled down the counter, cabinets onto the floor), then I can maintain my title as Entertainer of the Year.  Ok…maybe Entertainer of the Year in my county…wait…too broad…my road?….my address?  Whatever my title is (ahem Katie Bower of the house), I like dining rooms.

Anyhoo…I jumped on the ‘special occasion’ train for my own dining space and am using it this season to host a very monochromatic but still dramatic centerpiece.

The chairs are distracting.  Forgive them and their modern-ness.  They know not what they do.

Here’s a closer view of the centerpiece…

It all began with the idea of jamming as many skulls in a tall vase as possible.  It’s the mad scientist in me.  I can’t help it.

At the dollar store I found a bunch of cute Halloween stuff…for a dollar.  Hence the name.

I instagrammed about them but I’m sure everyone was like WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!  IT’S SUMMERTIME!  But that’s how the world rolls now.  Stores stock holiday gear ridiculously early.  I am waiting until it actually backs up on itself.  You know…when Christmas happens and on January 1, Hobby Lobby has the following year’s Christmas stuff already out.  Mark my words…it will happen.

So I tossed five skulls, six placemats, five spider packages, and three rats in my buggy and headed for the door.

Since the skulls were plastic and dirty white, I knew it would be easy to modify them to be a bit more spooky.  I just used black craft paint.  Nothing fancy.  After they dried, I just simply threw them in this tall Ikea vase and called it a day.

The wreath is one of those cheap grapevine wreaths that I ‘dusted’ with white spraypaint.  This is an old photo of when that happened.  Again…nothing fancy.

But the white wreaths look really spooky to me when black fuzzy spiders are crawling all over it.  It’s a nice graphic punch in the pants.  Plus, I can use it later during Christmas to get a snowy look.  I’m all about holiday gear pulling double duty.

After the center item was done, I flanked it with two pairs of black candlesticks.  I don’t know if you can tell but I made them dusty by blowing baby powder on them.  Next year I am just gonna skip dusting for a few weeks before hand and call it decorating.  No dusting for a couple weeks is gonna be a hard sacrifice but someone has to do it.  #yeahright

Beside the skull vase, I knew I needed something else tall so I whipped out this tiered plate holder.  It works really well for height.  One plate got a glitter pumpkin and the other a rat.

And that cute little danger sign was that mini chalkboard that I made a while back.  You can see the instructions here on how to DIY.

I like to keep the back buffet pretty clear because (I have no real reason)…..so I just put the random Halloween stuff that I had left over here.   A bunch of ‘B’ etch monogramed glasses (my mom found them at Goodwill for me), an old black candlestick, a little plate with a crow and a white pumpkin and finally a weird twisted metal tree thing.  My mom was gonna yard sale it but I took it off her hands and figured next year I can make Halloween ornaments with the boys to hang on it.

So that is my holiday dining room set up.  Are you doing a little spooky sprucing?  I love this season.  In fact, I might have too many posts to show you this week.  Like A TON of Halloween stuff – the boys pumpkins, the Halloween party we just hosted, the outdoor decorations, the costumes!  I am getting the shivers just thinking about it all!

p.s.  I post lots of sneak peeks on Instagram…so if you ever want the scoop on what’s coming up soon, follow me @bowerpowerblog – oh and come back later today because I have a cool giveaway for you.

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Comments

  1. I love dining rooms for exactly the reason you mentioned! When I have friends over to eat I don’t want to be able to look into a kitchen that has dirty dishes, etc.! I really dislike the trend to combine the dining room with the kitchen. I like to entertain and have the separate space. An eat-in kitchen is great, but give me a separate dining room each time!

  2. I finally got the sand textured pumpkins done, and threw in a little ghost in the wee hours, too.

    http://www.newmomstalk.com/2013/10/28/diy-sand-textured-pumpkins-on-a-beach/

    They were super simple if not super stylish and very cheap. The best part, perhaps, was videoing them on the sand as the waves tossed them all about. It was sunset, the winds were typically crazy, and our almost 11 month old was so content to climb and dig in the sand.

    I’m so glad we converted her to a beach baby!

    Since we don’t have a nearby pumpkin patch, all are welcome to visit and we can storm the sand with pumpkins, ghosts, and other Halloween realities!

  4. I totally agree with you about dining rooms. I know too many families that crowd around kitchen islands for dinner, or just eat in shifts. For us, breakfast and dinner are EVENTS. The whole family sits around the dining table and we have a real meal. My kids are really young still (1.5 & 4) but we’re hoping by instilling this young they know that family meals aren’t optional. Funny thing is, a few weeks ago we had our dinner at a neighborhood block party and when we got home my 4yr old asked when dinner would be. She thought because we didn’t sit around the dining table, it didn’t count! Score 1 for mama!!

  5. Love the centerpiece! Halloween is such fun, I love when people really get into decorating. I too love dining rooms, but luckily my house is sort of open-plan/shotgun style, so the dining room flows straight into the kitchen, which means we use it every night.

  6. Katie, I was talking with a lady in my small group at church, and her thoughts about cleaning the kitchen for dinner parties are this: “The fastest way to clean a kitchen is to take all of the dirty dishes and put them in a garbage bag. Put the garbage bag into the trunk of your car” Clean kitchen…. at least for a while! LOL.

  7. Halloween’s not that big a deal here in Austria – in my family we don’t decorate or celebrate it in any way so I always wondered how kids react to all that spooky stuff. I get the creeps from just looking at those fake spiders, skulls and that rat (!!). Not joking here. But nonetheless it’s a cool display.

  9. I personally want my kitchen mess separate from the entertainment areas. I understand why people like the idea of an open concept, but our house isn’t laid out that way. I LOVE that we can all sit down and talk, eat, watch tv, etc., and no one can see the dirty dishes piled in the sink or the crap all over the counters when we are entertaining and I can relax and enjoy my guests without feeling the need to get up and clean the kitchen so no one has to look at it 🙂

  10. I agree with you about dining rooms. In fact I am in the process of taking back my formal dining room after years as a music room for our piano. I love to have friends over for dinner and like those occasions to be a little more special and formal than just eating in our kitchen!

  16. Will likes the realistic things and the other stuff that he sees in stores, he doesn’t quite grasp. We just call witches “green ladies” or zombies “funny dirty guys”…stuff like that. We are pretty protective of him because of the nightmares he has always had so we just tend to keep the stuff as simple as possible (skulls are called black heads, and spiders and rats and pumpkins are all just real stuff we talk about in general!)
    xo – kb

  21. No way. No. No. No. They said your costume is a bad idea. How rude. That was a fantastic idea!!!!!!! I loved it. And yes you can paint abs on a baby!
    I’m really upset by this. Are you? You seem to take things more in stride so I’m sure you’re accepting of this. But FYI, I’m not!

  24. I also bemoan the disuse of the formal dining room. Not because I think everyone should use it, more because it seems like an atrocious waste of space to only use a room a couple times a year. I eat every meal in my dining room because (1) I have no table in my kitchen, which was a conscious choice, (2) I am completely uncomfortable eating standing or on the sofa, and (3) I’m just a formal person. The dining room is also where I do my sewing and any other activity that requires a table. Haha, I guess you never know which post will strike a cord in someone–I am completely unapologetic in my passion for the use of dining rooms.

  25. It was definitely meant as a joke so I am in no way offended. I thought it was funny…and Will liked it because he had a shiny necklace on 🙂
    xo – kb

  27. The table is from Southeastern salvage (I think originally it was Restoration Hardware) and the chairs are from Target.
    xo – kb

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