Skeletal Happiness!

Think I might be the most excited person ever!

Costco, my local Costco, has a pose-n-stay skeleton (about 5ft tall) in stock! And it's only August. And it's a reasonable price at only £28.78 inc VAT in store!

I'm absolutely getting one this weekend.

Slaves vs. Caesars

I've finally come up with the entertainment for this year's Halloween party - Slaves vs. Caesars, a twist on the game normally known as Tempt Your Fate!

When everyone arrives, they'll be sorted in some way into two teams, slaves and caesars. I haven't decided how this will happen yet, probably just picking a badge from a pot like I did last year.

Then throughout the night, people can earn points around the house by asking for challenges from me! I'll carry a cauldron filled with slips of paper, all containing different challenges.

Some will be fairly simple, like trivia questions about ancient rome. Some might be more physical like 'persuade a member of opposite team to give you their shoes'. I'm also thinking of having slips which command the person to take a shot, but I was also thinking of saving 'take a shot' for people who don't want to do the challenge drawn, or fail the challenge in some way.

We did Tempt The Fates in 2010 and it was pretty fun, though no one got points for it.

Toga'Ween 2013

Our theme for 2013 is - Toga Party!

Okay, I know - me and most of my friends are closer to 30 than 20 these days. Isn't a toga party kind of a college thing, not an adult thing?

Maybe! But I'm convinced we can have a grown-up party, and still have a lot of fun with costumes and booze :) which are the essential ingredients of any Halloween party.

So far, I have the following plans: 

• The decorations will be minimal in terms of fussiness. 
• Lots of cream and white, with gold and green accents. 
• Hanging ivy, plastic grapes and gold masks for doorways.
• Plastic roman shields to hang on various picture hooks.
• Finger foods like chicken drumsticks, grapes and bread.
• Lots of wine available! Possibly watered? Apparently Romans did that.
• Toga costumes for me and Terry of course.
• Make the bathroom into a Roman baths with skeleton in the bath.
• Turn one of the bedrooms into an astronomy room.
• Turn the other bedroom into a shrine for the Gods.

I'm also thinking of making wreaths for people to wear in their hair when they arrive, but they might do that for themselves.

And of course, I want to do games! I think having activities makes a party even more interesting, and gives people something to aside from get totally hammered. I'm not 100% what I'll be doing yet though, so I need to go have a look at other party games and see what can be adapted!

The Big Update Post

I'm really terrible at this blogging thing. As soon as I get busy, I fold like a wet paper towel in a wet paper towel folding machine.

So! For the three or four people who might be wondering how the Harry Potter party of 2011 went, here are some photos. Not everything went as planned, but it was probably the best party we've thrown so far and everyone seemed to have a good time. And Ravenclaw won the House Cups!

Terry and I as Snape and Hermione.

The 'Guess The Potion' game, where people had to take a shot of a potion and write down their guess for house points.

The display of HP books.

The Honeydukes buffet.

Nearly Headless Nick grabbing a Sorting Badge.

My friend Holly and I - she came as Aragog! You can just see the floating candles above us, and the first HP movie playing in the background.

It was a great time. I did learn some things though - for a start, fishing wire is not as strong as you think it is. The floating candles kept sliding down into the centre.

Also, if you fill your bathroom with spiders and declare it Aragog's Lair, at least one person will refuse to go to the loo until it's made 'safe'.

But anyway! That was two years ago, so I'm on to the next theme. We skipped 2012 because we didn't really have the money or the time to put into it, but this year we're in a new house and I intend to do things properly again - and actually get decent pictures myself this year instead of forgetting like every other time.

Crafty Banner-Making

So as I explained previously, I'm not very crafty. But no more! I have unleashed my inner pritt stick goddess and made these:

This project took me maybe an hour and a half? Not very long, although I started it in the morning and then had to go feed my mum's cats, and on the way back there was a thunderstorm so we drove around watching it.... so it didn't get finished until the afternoon.

Here's how it started!

I got the black paper, which isn't used in this example but will be used on a copy of today's work, from W H Smith's for around £1 each I think. The pritt stick and scissors I already had, and we had some leftover coloured card at work which luckily matched the colours I needed: red, yellow, blue and green.

I printed out each of the house crests onto A4 paper. Be warned, Slytherin especially looks very pixelated when you look at it on paper and up close, but I found if you stand back from it (and since I'm planning on hanging mine over a balcony, that made sense) then they look fine.

To make the rectangles of card look more like pennants, I cut a triangle out of the bottom.

To get them all the same size, I cut out one and then laid it against the others one and by one to mark where the top of the triangle came to. Then you just cut from the corners to the dot. Keep the triangles for later.

Cutting out the house crests was easy enough, until I did Ravenclaw. Fiddly! The wings of the raven jut out the top of the crest and created about as much cutting work as doing the other three crests together.

Those triangles now come in handy! I wanted to glue all the way up to the edges of the crests (especially on bloody Ravenclaw) but equally did not want glue on my table. So I used the leftover triangles as surface protectors.

To make sure they were all glued into roughly the same place on each pennant, I used a DVD case as a placemarker.

And behold.... the finished products!

I am veeeery happy with these, and plan to hang them over my bedroom balcony so that the first thing people see when they come in, aside from the floating candles (more on that another time) will be these hanging up.

My Saturday feels very productive :)

Getting My Craft On

I'll be the first to admit, I'm not usually the girl who makes everything by hand and can sew a button back on a coat with her eyes closed. I can barely tie my own shoelaces. Fabric scissors are both fascinating and deadly - I am not a naturally crafty person. Unlike my mother, who made a variety of costumes for me when I was a child, including a little mermaid costume with detachable tail. She has a sewing machine and everything. I have ebay.

Yes, generally I buy what I need. It's normally far better quality than whatever I could dare to make myself. However, there are some things you can't buy, such as signs for around the house that say things like 'Aragog's Lair'. Or a Hogwarts scoreboard, in the absence of reliable way to keep scores using hour glasses (damn you, magic).

So on Sunday I went and traipsed around the shops - I walked the entire length of the shopping centre in an hour and didn't find everything I wanted, but did find some things I didn't realise I wanted. I got a bag of sherbet lemons, some mint humbugs and some chocolate limes from Poundland for my sweetie buffet. I got a roll of brown paper and some string, for making packages for the outdoors display.

And I also got..... three big black sheets of card. Two are going to become Hogwarts banners - I've seen fabric versions online but doing it this way is going to cost me ooh, about £2, as opposed to £7 before post and packing. And the third one will be the scoreboard. I'm going to print off the house crests to stick onto each quarter, and then print categories to stick onto the board, and I've bought a gold pen that I will use on the night to write the points down with!

I can just about see it in my head, but it's going to be interesting to try and put it onto paper, especially since like I mentioned, I'm not the sort of naturally talented woman who can throw some glitter and glue at a scrapbook and have it come out looking like a professional job.

Updates and pictures possibly tonight or tomorrow! In other news, I went to T K Maxx and now have a visceral need for a glittery silver owl.

Of Course! Brainwave!

I'm an idiot!

For the last month I've been wondering how I'm going to manage a fake forest in the bedroom - you have to walk through the bedroom to get to the bathroom, which is going to be Aragog's Lair - and thinking about cutting up big bits of cardboard to make them.

Which completely overlooks the obvious. So bloody obvious!

Artificial christmas trees.

Now I feel so genius, it's ridiculous.