Spruce Up Your House With Help From Mickey Mouse

Martha Stewart has a paint line. So does Ralph Lauren. Now it’s Mickey Mouse’s turn.

Disney, not shy about venturing into new territory whenever the Mouse smells cheese (translation: moola), has come out with a line of house paints as a step into the home-improvement arena.

Until the early 1990s, Walt Disney Studios used to develop, with an on-site chemist, its own paint colors for the millions of cels used in making classic animated features from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” to “The Little Mermaid.”

The Disney house paints, sold at Wal-Mart, were developed in collaboration with Sherwin-Williams over the last three years. Disney handpicked 168 colors with names such as Blushing Piglet (pink), Pixie Dust (pastel blue), and, of course, Black Ears Mouse (black). Disney character stamps for stenciling are also available for the handy and brave.

If only they could bottle the pixie dust so that a room could be magically transformed with a fresh coat of paint without the need for elbow grease.

Talk about bringing down the curtain--the run-of-the-mill shower curtain with holes across the top for hooking it to a shower curtain rod. Think of the one in “Psycho” where, at the end of the shower scene, the curtain pops out of the hooks--sort of the way it does in real life.

So consider a shower scene without the bloody mess--and the hooks. Just slip the curtain rod through reinforced holes in a shower curtain and forget the hooks. That’s what the Hookless shower curtain is all about.

Depending on pattern and material, the Hookless shower curtain costs $9.99-$39.99; the Stuffits version with mesh pockets for storing toiletries ranges from $4.99-$19.99. The Hookless shower curtain is available at Wal-Mart, Kmart, QVC and Bed Bath & Beyond.

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Candace A. Wedlan can be reached at candace.wedlan@latimes.com.