Honeydukes Prep

We went to Ikea yesterday. I love Ikea, and could happily spend a day there eating hotdogs and meatballs and filling a trolley with fluffy rugs and cute side tables.

However, this time we had a purpose! I'd been searching the internet for sweet shop jars and not come across anything that suited my purposes as well as being affordable. Having a candy buffet is very 'in' right now, mainly for weddings but also for parties, so prices aren't as reasonable as they could be. Luckily, I have a marvelous boyfriend who knows things I don't, like: Ikea stock glass jars a lot like what I was looking for.

So we went, and now I have 3 large and 3 medium glass jars, with sealing lids!

I also received two more packages in the post, one of which is completely perfect considering that I'd just been and bought the other half of it. Sugar tongs!

And last but not least, my Harry Potter badges. I posted the eBay listing picture of them originally but here they are!

I was also surprised to find they'd included a fifth badge - maybe my purchase of 20 Harry Potter pins gave them an idea about where my interests lie....

Little Books!

This isn't going to be a long post, but I got a little package in the post and I had to show it off...

I present: shrunken hardbacks!

The photo is rubbish because it was just me holding the packet in front of my webcam but it gives a good idea of the scale. Those of you attending the party, take note! These are what you need to keep your eyes peeled for, haha.

Games Galore!

One of the hardest,most worrying parts of throwing a party:

Is anyone going to enjoy themselves?

For my first proper party last year, I had Tempt Your Fate available for people to play. The object was mainly to induce drinking. Vast amounts of drinking. And it worked! So I'm trying to put together some games for this year on the basis that they get people talking, moving about, and hopefully cheerfully bungalowed.

So what have I got up my (non-wizarding) sleeve?


1. Shrunken Hardback Hunt

Neville was practicing his charms in the library when he accidentally shrunk the full set of Harry Potter books! Now the books are loose within Hogwarts - if you find one, return it to Hermione to win house points.


2. Snape's Potion Challenge

Professor Snape is very angry! Some thieving first years have been in his potions cupboard and torn of all the labels off his vials. Each student must work with their housemates to guess what substance each vial holds, and there's only one way to find out - by drinking them!


3. Hermione's Tricky Trivia

Think you know Harry Potter? Find Hermione and challenge her to pose you a question from her Cauldron Of Questions - get it right and you could win points for your house.


These games fit all my criteria - fairly cheap to set up, something people can do with others but also individually, and don't involve trying to get everyone together in one room at the same time! That's the part I dread when people suggest things to do - it'd be like herding cats. In a cheese and mice factory.

And all I need now is to buy the test tubes and shrunken books (I'm not actually going to try and shrink some real books. That'd be ridiculous).

First Harry Potter Purchase

The excitement begins! My theme this year for Halloween is 'A Hogwarts Halloween' and I'm already watching a LOT of items on ebay. My first purchase though, is these fantastic badges:

I absolutely love them. They're exactly what I was picturing in my head, which isn't normally easy to match up to. The purpose of these badges is pretty simple - everyone who walks through the front door, including Tel but minus myself, will be sorted into a house (probably by taking a badge from a sorting hat). The best part is, once they're sorted they can wear the badge and identify other housemates!

This will be useful because there are going to be house points awarded for various activities around the house - some being very basic, like taking a shot to win ten points, others being harder - and if people know who their housemates are, they can easily group together. Why bother, you ask? I'll tell you why - the house with the most points at the end of the night will be awarded prizes!

This is the first purchase, but there's going to be more as the weeks go by - I need to get a Hermione costume sorted for one thing, and some Snape-related items for Tel.

The Long Awaited Update!

I know, I know. I did an update about some aspects of the 2010 party, and then vanished into thin air. I didn't intend to, but once Halloween is over I tend to lose interest briefly, because Christmas is then only 2 months away and dammit, I always decorate on the 1st of December.

I have some really awesome, amazing plans for this year's Halloween. I'm starting a lot earlier, because I therefore have far more time to save, spend and squirrel away bits and pieces. To give you a clue as to my plans, this year will be called 'A Hogwarts Halloween'.

But before I get into that, I'm going to make this post an update on last year! Reading the posts I actually did last year reminded me how helpful it is to see what you should have done differently - I'd forgotten that two bags of leaves wasn't enough, for example. So documenting what I can remember will hopefully bring back some memories and make planning this year easier.

I'm lying, of course. Planning this year is already taking over my life.

Tempt Your Fate - A Review

This game went down a storm. I was worried no one would play, but everyone had a go, and the only problem was that I'd made far too many fates and no one got one of the treats, so we had to do a random draw for them at the end of the night!

First up is Jenny selecting a Fate!

This is a slightly blurry shot of the Fate she selected. In case you can't read it, it says:

"You've really pissed off the Fates! Redeem yourself! Do a shot from your choice of the Spooky Spirits!"

And she selected the green Spirits! There was also a choice of a red Spirit but green was more popular overall. Among the other Fates, there were instructions telling you to eat a Beastly Body Part (a gummy body part covered in syrup, that is) or to do a shot of Awful Antidote (dark rum - it was bloody awful, I can attest to that!) and there were a couple of Fates that told people to hug a stranger, or kiss one, etc etc.

I definitely think this game helped encourage people to both loosen up and drink throughout the night. I'm not doing it again this year but I've got other plans for drinking games to help keeps things ticking along.

Other Details

As I mentioned in a previous post, I seriously underestimated how much time it would take to set everything up, which meant when people started arriving I hadn't had time to take pictures of the little details. The best pictures are already in the post before this one.

Overall, the entire thing went really well! Everyone really enjoyed themselves, and as a result I'm really looking forward to this year's party. Hopefully some of the last year's guests might even be reading this and in case they are: here are some random photos from throughout the night. There's none of me because these are all from my camera!

What Did We Wear?

Just a quick post about costumes!

Tel and I were Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. I got my costume from eBay for just under a tenner, and we got the various bits of his costume from eBay as well, though I did shop around a lot to find cheaper things than just one big costume. His probably came to somewhere between fifteen to twenty quid, but it was worth it - you can't see it in the picture but as well as the gloves and full head mask, that included a fluffy tail!

I had a slight panic when my costume first arrived and I gave it a trial run, because the advert had made it look like it covered a respectable amount of skin. Well, it doesn't. You WILL flash your arse in this sort of kit! Luckily I solved this problem by making it look deliberate and wearing frilly pants with built-in suspenders, so the odd bending-over moment wasn't a big deal. You've got to be pretty brave about the state of your thighs though if you're going to go for this.

I'm off shopping for the day, hopefully to come back with maybe a freezer and definitely some birthday presents for the lovely Tel, who is turning 27 this Thursday :) at some point today though I'll be updating about the Tempt Your Fate game - with pictures!

Set-Up: Evaluation

I didn't mean to leave it this long to update this, but the last couple of days have been wicked tiring! As it turns out, a really awesome party = a lot of cleaning up afterwards.

So! Everything started to kick off properly on Friday 29th, when I started decorating. One of the first things to go up was the graveyard outside. I took the pic opposite while it was still light because I'll be damned if I'm any good at taking pictures when it's dark. Just visible in the trees are two hanging skeletons. When it got darker I turned on the LED finger lights that were set up at angles to light up the tombstones, but the batteries were appalling - as in by the time the first guests were arriving, four of the six were almost out. At least I know in advance for next year though - then I can do what I wanted to do in the first place; invest in proper stake lights!

All those leaves scattered around? They did not come from the tree at the top of the picture. That's two bin bags worth of leaves from down the street! In fact, that wasn't even enough. You'd think two huge bags full of leaves would go a long way, but that's another tip for next year - get way, way more leaves.

This is my front door! It's not exactly Halloween-OTT but I'm crazy disappointed that I didn't have time to get more photos of the little details of the decorations. I meant to go round and get photos of everything, but we underestimated how much time we needed to get ready so I was still making Tel into a wolf when the first guests arrived. And then once the party was started, it was all about pictures of people rather than things. So I'm gutted I don't really have a proper record of all the little details that made it an awesome night, which is why I'm posting a picture of my door - it's one of the only details I do have!

Things I have learnt so far then! That I need more leaves, better lighting, and more time to take pictures before everything gets going. Also, that if my boyfriend will be wearing a costume, it's better if he starts getting ready earlier in the night so that he's not trapped in the upstairs bathroom, frantically rubbing face paint into his beard while people start arriving.

I did get a couple of pictures of the kitchen. We used a Chop Shop bloody instruments banner across one corner, which looked great and is completely reusable - it's folded up in a box, ready for next year. Also visible in this first picture is my version of the Tempt Your Fate game that I found about on the Halloween Forum. We nailed two cauldrons to a corkboard to hold fates to be taken and used fates, and all the punishments, such as Awful Antidote (dark rum) and Spooky Spirits (cherry and apple vodka shots) were lined up underneath. We had other fates, but I'll come back to that in another post!

Most of the food in these pictures isn't unpacked yet so the effect isn't spot on, but the food we had went down really well. I've had parties before where you're left with acres of food afterwards that no one seemed to want but this year, we had about 25 cheese balls, 6 coconut balls and a bowl of gummy sweets left, and that was about it! Nothing was homemade, since we didn't have much time or space, unless you count throwing some mini sausages and some vegetable spring rolls in an oven until they're slightly too cooked as homemade :)

Another note for next time - make time to get coloured lightbulbs. An orange bulb in the kitchen would have looked really interesting, but we never got round to going to a hardware store. We could have used green in the bedroom as well, for a bit of additional spook!

I didn't get a proper pic of the inside of the conservatory and to be honest, there wasn't much to see since I'd planned to have the pumpkin carving set up in there, but we were let down by the person supposed to be selling us a table and chairs, so we just did it in the kitchen. Which meant the conservatory was really unused, except as a brief pitstop for people who were on their way out to have a smoke. What you can see in this pic is the room roll that covered three quarters of the conservatory. Never again. I thought the idea of room roll was fantastic, but it took forever to put up, the top and bottom halves didn't line up properly and the material didn't want to stick to either white tack or sticky tape. Definitely not worth the effort for so little return.