This Star Wars’ AT-AT costume for a dog looks great. Katie Mello, who works as a stop-motion character fabricator at LAIKA/house, made this for her greyhound named Bones. Read more about it here. [Craft]

Happy Halloween!

Lately it seems that people are interested in making their own shoes–or at least upgrading a pair that already exists to look more fashionable. Not only are these fun projects, given the cost of shoes these days, they could save you a bit of money too.

Here are three examples of DIY shoes, with more to come in the future:

Corinne’s Craft Closet on Craft took a pair of shoes and “bedazzled” them with iron-on crystals. What a great way to make a pair of cheap shoes look a whole lot cooler. There’s a video too:

Similarly, LizTough took a $20 pair of Payless shoes and added a knit panel, which made them look just like a $99 pair she was coveting. In fact, I think I like hers more.

Finally, Paleotool made these high-tops all himself. Even the laces were made from brain-tanned elk hide that he processed himself. Pretty impressive, really.

Have you ever improved or upgraded your own shoes? I’d love to hear about it.

[Courtesy hans s]

Chickens can be mean. They often fight for domination and pull each other’s feathers out, and will even peck each other to death if given the chance.

This video helped me understand how the pecking order works with chickens:

I’m dealing with this right now with my flock. Olivia has a bald patch on her back from the other chicken, Penny, pulling out her feathers. To be fair, Olivia will attack or peck at anything, which seems like it would be annoying to live with. Maybe, if I were a chicken, I would want to put her in her place too.

There has been no blood so far, but to prevent that from happening, I’m thinking of getting some anti-peck lotion–something nontoxic that tastes bad and will deter, or at least reduce, the pecking.

I’m not sure what to get, so would appreciate any suggestions you have.

Kim from A Girl and a Glue Gun wanted to make a drum shade for her kitchen, but couldn’t find a shade in a thrift store. So she made her own drum shade and put up a tutorial on her blog.

Since Kim rents, she couldn’t take down the light fixture, so she sat the drum right one top of it. She even dyed the fabric herself. Looks great. [Craft]

I’ve talked about how I don’t have TV before on here, and one of the reasons is because of overexposed celebrities, like Snooki or Kim Kardashian or Charlie Sheen. It’s annoying to hear about the same person (or event) over and over again, especially if you don’t care about it in the first place.

So I love this hacked remote control on Make that automatically mutes celebrities. It’s called Enough Already.

The way it works is, a hacked piece of computer hardware called an Arduino automatically reads the closed-captioning transcript as it airs and then mutes the TV for 30 seconds when it picks up certain words.

That way, you can tell it to avoid the word “KARDASHIAN,” and whenever that comes up on the programming, the TV automatically goes quiet.

The whole thing cost $70 to make.

If you are technically inclined, here’s more on the project from Make:

Is this the remote of the future? I hope so.

Instead of paying $60 for a shower curtain with an octopus on it, you could paint your own like the above example from Casasugar.

Of course, that presupposes that you have the artistic skill to paint a design like that. I sure don’t, but it’s nice to dream. [Craft]

This DIY project from Instructables shows you how to make a Magnetic Key Holder with your light switch.

All you do is wrap a magnet in some kind of cap and then put it in the light switch, like so:

The result is an elegant key holder right by the door. No need for a hook or bowl to hold those keys when you’ve got this more minimalist solution instead. [Lifehacker]

Our shower is finished!

I have mentioned our ongoing bathroom remodel before on here. It is taking a long time because Mr. Savvy only has time to work on it one day a week. Also, our bathroom was really gross and needed a lot of work. Here is the original tub:

Here is what it looks like now:

Before:

After:

It’s sad that I can’t get better pictures of the finished shower (it’s cramped in there), because it looks great. Also, putting the new shower in was a lot of work. We had to remove the old tub and linoleum, plumb the new shower head and faucet, and put in new cement board behind the tub. Then we had to tile:

It took three months.

Next we’re starting tiling the floor.

My goal is to get the bathroom completely done this year. I hope we make it.

I was saying the other day that I thought having an ice cream maker was one of the best “extras” you can have in a kitchen. After all, nothing beats homemade ice cream. But if you don’t want to buy one, you can try to make your own ice cream maker like this guy did. And then make his awesome-looking Elderflower Ice Cream.

Or you can ditch the machine altogether and make ice cream by hand using basic kitchen implements and the freezer. The results look tasty:

Here’s another method to make ice cream without the machine using evaporated milk and ice cube trays. I’m not sure how it tastes, but it looks good:

Personally, if I didn’t want to spring for a new ice cream maker, I would skip all this and look around some thrift stores for a hand crank model. They show up more often than you would think.

Savvy Housekeeping Ice Cream Recipes Round-Up:

• Pliny the Elder Beer Ice Cream
• Strawberry Lavender Ice Cream
• Snow Ice Cream
• Cranberry Sorbet
• Bourbon Ice Cream

According to Make, all you have to do to make your own Hedge Maze Area Rug is to tape off the pattern and carve out the design with a pair of electric hair clippers.

The results are pretty cool looking. And there’s no reason to stick to the labyrinth design–any grid-like design sounds like it would work great. [Apartment Therapy]