husband – Page 4 – Casa de Berry

2012, costume, craft, halloween, husband

Behind the scenes with the Xenomorph

November 2, 2012November 2, 2012by casadeberry6 Comments

My husband spent about 40-50 hours making the costume, including the entire night before Halloween. I did my best to keep him fed and Mountain Dew-ed but that was pretty much the extent of my contribution, this project was all him.

Here are some pics I took during the making of the Xenomorph costume:

The wire frame for the head.

The torso, made up of wire ribbing with duct tape over it, blackout vinyl, electrical conduit, pipe insulation, and vacuum hose. The back horns/pipes are made up of pool noodles.

My little vampire (so cute with his missing teeth!) putting on the helmet that supported the head:

The head structure during drying time

There are two pieces of clear plastic on the top — made from soda bottles — which is where my boy could see out of. It was very hard to see him, though, which made for a better illusion.

Thank you to everyone who has posted/emailed us such nice comments. I think Steve rocked it out of the park with this costume and I’m so proud of him! Have a great weekend!!

2012, costume, craft, halloween, husband

The Xenomorph from Alien

October 31, 2012November 2, 2012by casadeberry12 Comments

Last year, my husband rocked making a Godzilla costume for our little man Alex — he even made the SF Chronicle’s list of finalist in their costume contest!

This year, it was our oldest boy’s turn to get a daddy-made costume, and he requested the Xenomorph from Alien. At 7 1/2, he has never seen the movie (neither have I, by the way) but he saw the alien itself on youtube and decided that was it. And daddy obliged:

Yes, my husband is insane 😀 He worked on this costume for about two weeks, roughly 40-50 hours, and has yet to go to sleep since yesterday. But he loves making stuff like this and even more so, when his kid loves it as well. And our boy did.

I love his sweet classmate’s face here, the kids loved the costume and kept asking my husband how he made it.

My husband and his parents were there to help our boy put on the costume, here Gran helps Aidan walk out of the classroom and line up for the parade:

I love the look on Steve’s face here, so happy that his boy loves his costume!

More pics from the parade:

Happy Halloween, everyone!

2012, costume, halloween, husband

A peek at this year’s costume

October 29, 2012October 29, 2012by casadeberryLeave a Comment

My husband has been working hard on our oldest’s costume – check out the sneak peek!

2012, boys, costume, halloween, husband

Past Halloween costumes

October 27, 2012October 27, 2012by casadeberryLeave a Comment

Before we do the big reveal of this year’s awesome possum Halloween costume, I thought I’d do a little recap of (mostly) the boys’ past getups.

Baby Aidan rocks his reindeer outfit – I love his chubby fingers!

This was his official costume, but on the day of, he was very cranky and spent the evening in a shirt and diaper. But he was a darn cute Superman 😀

Alexander gives us fierce with his Count Dracula costume:

We won a costume contest at our friends’ party, wheee!

The first time that elephant costume will be seen, this time on Aidan; Alex was a SF Forty-Niner, and as always, the first house was our dear neighbors’, we have been truly lucky when it comes to the people on our block.

Second year for the elephant costume, Aidan was still in the grip of elephant madness, so he wore it again.

Alexander was a little batty that year (ba-dum-pum!) and he LOVED trick-or-treating.

As you can see, we got LOTS of mileage out of that elephant costume. Aidan was moving on to dinosaurs and was a t-rex rider:

This year, Aidan was into Bakugan, so daddy and I obliged. I sewed the wings and Steve made everything else.

Alexander loved Wubbzy, so I made him the outfit, while Steve painted the face on and crafted the tail.

Aidan starts his superhero phase, and looks awesome (she said un-biased-ly) as Captain America:

And, so far, the mother of all costumes, Steve knocks it out of the park with a Godzilla costume for Alexander:

Yeah, we love making stuff, don’t we? This year is Steve’s most ambitious project yet, and it’s coming along nicely. Alexander is wearing an off-the-rack costume — we hadn’t planned it this way but it’s worked out that the boys are getting homemade costumes on alternate years, Aidan’s Bakugan costume in 2010, Alexander’s Godzilla costume last year, and Aidan’s … let’s say, “of foreign extraction” costume this year. Which is nice as I don’t think we can handle TWO fancy homemade costumes AND Halloween decorations every year. Alex did get the Wubbzy costume as well in 2010, but it was just a simple jacket and pants.

Hope your weekend is going great, and best thoughts and luck to all those in Hurricane Sandy’s path.

2012, decor, halloween, holiday, husband

Final touches to our Insane Asylum

October 26, 2012October 26, 2012by casadeberry8 Comments

Thanks for the kind comments on our front yard Insane Asylum – we’ve been getting awesome feedback from the neighbors as well 😀

Steve added some final touches before starting his next project, our oldest’s Halloween costume (more on that in a couple of days).

Side fence is done, my contribution was to hold the wood pieces in place so that he could secure the fence itself 😀

A creepy touch near our front door is this dropcloth full of nice, welcoming sentiments, including Red Rum, which had to be explained to me since I haven’t seen that movie, and which are dotted with paint that will show up under black light.

You must pass under this sweet smiley face to get candy:

I noticed the shadows on my car and had to get a pic 😀

Finally, the windows seem to be getting angrier and angrier. Hmmm . . .

So, this is what awaits trick-or-treaters on Halloween night. We’re already thinking of what we (and by we, I mean Steve) will do for next year’s Halloween. It just never ends. Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

2012, craft, halloween, husband

Thufferin’ Thuccotash!

October 22, 2012by casadeberry4 Comments

I am sick as a dog.

Let me rephrase that. I am sick as a cat. My poor cat, Willie-Boo, had the most miserable look about him yesterday. He was just sitting in the middle of the living room, nose almost touching the floor. Very unlike him, usually he’s scampering around, picking fights with Bernie or seeing who can pet him next. He sneezed about 80 times on Saturday, poor thing.

I spent the weekend “coming down with something” and the something is here. It’s a cold, and my youngest and I have been sniffling for hours. Thank you, Willie-Boo, for sharing.

I have no post for y’all today as I have barely any brain left from all the coughing and sneezing. Bleargh. I suffer from allergies and got really bad headaches this summer but I rarely get sick, as in a cold or anything else, so I am more mad than miserable, because people, I HAVE THINGS TO DO!!!

So I’m just going to cheer y’all up with this picture. It’s my husband’s work table in the garage. This is what happens when he gets creative.

Love ya, honey! 😀

2012, decor, halloween, husband

It’s scary out there!

October 15, 2012October 19, 2012by casadeberry18 Comments

My husband Steve has been working hard on bringing up the scary factor in our front yard – this year we are going with an Insane Asylum theme, so he created a Tim Burton-esque fence. Would you believe an integral part of this fence was oatmeal?

It turns out my youngest’s favorite food makes for the perfect, rusted out texture on the pipes.

Here are two of our tall and spindly friends, Rusty and Crusty 😀

The PVC pipes were bent with the help of a heat gun, thinner pipe will, obviously, be easier to bend. The fleur de lis tops are made out of workout mat foam and then attached to the pipes. Once the pipes have been primed a mixture of sand and oatmeal go on for texture.

Once dry, Steve dappled orange craft paint on with a sea sponge. While the orange is still wet, he sprayed it with watered down brown paint to give it some dimension. The final layer was red mahogany wood stain, dripped over everything.

A few days ago I posted some details on the Insane Asylum sign on the column Steve built, it’s pretty awesome ;D BTW, 2003 is the year we got married. That’s right, we’re coming up on ten years next June!

Fake Ivy and Spanish moss were added to complete the creepy atmosphere, and some wood planks were added to our house windows. I guess we knew we had done that right when a sweet girl who lives down the block said “it looks like your house is mad at me!” .

That’s our very scary front yard ready for trick-or-treaters, or anyone who wants to know what kind of stuff we do on our spare time. This has been all Steve, though, I take no credit for any of it other than keeping him company at times and keeping him fed and hydrated while he builds it 😀

2012, craft, decor, fall, husband, october, paint

Insane Asylum sign

October 1, 2012October 3, 2012by casadeberry9 Comments

This past weekend, my husband made an awesome sign for Halloween.

Although, considering how crazy we tend to get around the holidays, I might be keeping that sign up for a while 😀

The backing is an old puzzle tray we had, pieces had gone missing long ago but the tray itself was perfect for this project. Steve added plain thumbtacks, then cut out the letters from foam – yes, by hand, I keep entering those Silhouette giveaways but haven’t won one yet – and then glued them to the frame. The first coat of spray was a metallic copper, then he did a wash with black paint so the pigment would settle into the crevices, and finally he added some greenish paint for a rusted, patina look.

I think he did such a great job!!! He has a lot more planned for our front yard but we wanted to share this bit for now.

So creepy!!!

2012, canning, fruits, gardening, husband

I’m a convert!

September 26, 2012September 25, 2012by casadeberry2 Comments

Okay, so the subject of grape jelly is one that has been hotly debated in our household for the past decade. Steve, my husband, LOVES it. I think it’s bleh. So when he came up with the idea of using our Concord grapes to make jelly instead of just eating them fresh off the vine, I was all “what the . . . ?” Seriously, you can get grape jelly at WalMart for under two bucks, why go through the whole production of making grape jelly?

I watched him harvest about half of the grapes on the vine. The rest were still greenish and have been maturing these last few days. He came back into the kitchen with this:

which I looked at kind of like this:

Undeterred, Steve found a recipe (or three, he scanned a few, got the idea and then did his own thing) and began cooking it down – and oh my goodness it smelled SO GOOD!!!
I kept looking over and over, and finally he gave me a taste of super hot jammy goodness.

I told him that even though it looked like the remains of a vamp on True Blood, it was Oh. So. Fricking. Delicious!