The Blood-Soaked Bathroom

I'm in a Halloween state of mind again today, starting to feel a little frazzled about pulling off the party I want when I've yet to have a free moment to start planning...but excited nonetheless.

So here are a few more re-caps of last year's decorative elements - this time a room a lot of people ignore, but one that has tons of possibilities - THE BATHROOM!

We have an all-white bathroom, which sounds great at first - you can personalize it to whatever you want - but in reality, it's like a giant blank screen that every little fleck of dirt and hair shows up on. EEW. Though it's nowhere near the top of the list, I'd eventually like to destroy this bathroom and trade it in for one with under sink storage and multi-colored tile.

But around Halloween, it works great! I picked up a few packs of the gel-cling blood splatters, and they stick to tile, mirrors, and as you can see, even the toilet :) They contrast really well on the white, so I thought the effect was pretty cool. Our Medicine cabinet has 4 light bulbs, and at first I replaced all 4 with red bulbs (I get the compact fluorescent "twirly" bulbs at Walgreens, they are AWESOME and don't break like classic light bulbs), but that was too dark and I didn't want to deal with anyone (GUYS) "missing" and have a mess to clean up later - so for the party I alternated red/normal/red/normal.

I found that the really heavy "drips" sometimes wouldn't support their own weight, I picked up the ones I had tried to hang on the glass doors of the basement shower after they peeled themselves off and plunged to the floor - to be covered with carpet fuzz. The smaller drips were fun but straightening and assembling all the pieces got tedious - they're just gel, so they don't hold their shape when peeled off the plastic, they sort of wilt like picking up a piece of jell-o, and you have to arrange all the "legs" of the more splotchy blood spatter. Some of them had what looked like razor blades embedded - these looked so real, but were just a foil paper!



I packed them all back in either their original packaging or on plastic plates wrapped in cling wrap, I'm hoping they are re-usable for many years to come.

I love decorating the bathroom because people are less likely to notice if it's not sparkling when they have something to draw their eye. The low light helps with this as well :) And the bathroom is generally a relatively quiet, solitary place that people can relax and really look around at your details.