This Halloween I decided to throw an All Hallows' Eve party with Micah's and my friends.. Of course a great excuse to decorate our house a little early for some spooky fun. ;)
We also finished off some much needed projects (as we aaaaalways do before parties) so our home is feeling more finalized.. Although I'm coming to suspect that I'll always want to change/redecorate some aspect of our house..
Anywho, here's some creepin pics of the festivities!
The invite - I designed it on an app called Rhonna Designs. The app is made specifically to add words and doodles to pictures so I sort of tricked it into making an invitation. But it totally worked!
The entry - I'm pretty proud of the chalkboard art I did! It only took like... Several hours and lots of broken pieces of chalk... But totally worth it. ;)
The table and stool are from IKEA, the metal shoe rack and metal vase + flowers are from Target, and I made the table runner with fabric I found at Hobby Lobby.
The kitchen - I unfortunately ran out of time for more decorations but am loving how the mixed tissue paper, book pages, and scrapbook paper all combined.
I also placed orange lights underneath the bar counter so it glowed a lovely orange.. Probably my fave decor!
The Party Food -
I might have gone a little overboard on the sweets and candy for the party.. But you can never have enough sugar in October, am I right? :P
Cake pops (my obsession ever since I found the super easy recipe), mini cupcakes, chocolate chip cookies, owl shaped cupcakes, and some pumpkin topped cupcakes. Oh and of course a TON of candy.. But that's a must-have, right?
Zoey approved!
For the dinner, I decided to go with classic soup and bread bowls. Who doesn't love soup on cold winter/fall nights?! I bought my fave chili and tossed that into a crock pot, then made (from scratch and for the first time ever) a potato, bacon, and cheese soup. Betty Crocker had a pretty yum and easy recipe so I followed it to a T and it turned out pretty good! So that soup went into another crock pot.
Then the appetizers were: chips and salsa (as well as my own personal crack addiction, queso dip that I poured into a tiny crock pot.. Genius idea to keep the goodness warm throughout the whole party!) a strawberry salad (my fave salad lately), meatballs, and some super cute little cuties.
The strawberry salad is pretty complicated.. Ready? Spinach, strawberries, goat cheese, walnuts, and a strawberry poppyseed dressing. Super complex.
The meatball glaze I found I'm slightly in love with... I wanted/needed something really easy yet yummy because I had about 20 minutes til my party started when I began thinking of how to dish out the meatballs... So I found a recipe on Pinterest that I altered a bit and really love. It may be the pregnancy cravings telling me it was yummier than it actually was, but either way I'm sticking with it. All you need is a 16 oz bottle of bbq sauce and 3 tablespoons of soy sauce. Boom. That's it. So I dumped the meatballs (that I warmed up in the microwave) into yet another crock pot and poured/mixed the sauces all around. I may have eaten about 16 meatballs that night... And had some as a lunch snack the following day. Can't help it, they were amazing! I dare you to not fall in love.
Lastly the little cuties, I simply drew jack o lantern faces on them and stacked them up on a little platter. Super fun and festive, and also pretty healthy! Side note: my sharpie kept dying as I was drawing the faces on so I rotated through a few different ones to get all the faces drawn.
Costumes, games and prizes:
Micah, Olive, and I dressed up as Heisenberg/Walter White from Breaking Bad.. In all of his different stages. I didn't get any great pics at our party but got some at our family party the week before.
I made her jumpsuit about an hour before the family party... Out of an IKEA bag! Add a zipper and boom! You've got a baby meth cooker. :O maybe a little too realistic.. Anyway Olive hated having her makeup beard and glasses drawn. Totally freaked out, poor thing. And to think I did this to her twice. Oh well! She still loves me. ;)
Brittney, Scott, & Karter dressed up as monsters inc, Karter being an adorable Mike Wisowski (spelling?), Britt wearing a pair of purple leggings with a pink hoody (she's got pigtails you just can't see them) and Scott was wearing a shirt with Sully on it. Talk about perfect family outfit!
Sheridan and Brian however dressed up as the Lego people from the Lego movie and pretty much killed the competition! They won the golden pumpkin award (a golden spray painted pumpkin). It might have something to do with when I opened the door they were singing "Everything is Awesome" and I couldn't stop laughing.. Either way, amazing costumes.
We had big plans for the games but by the time we sat down to play them there weren't that many couples to divide into teams. The ones we had ready were some Halloween movie trivia game, Heads Up (app on my phone), and the last game is a game that has multiple stages to it and is seriously a laugh-fest!
It starts out with everyone writing down 3 characters (I was going to stick with the Halloween vibe) and so someone like Jack Skellington or Michael Jackson (Thriller) would be appropriate. Then everyone tosses their papers into a bowl and we separate boys vs. girls. The way the game works is in stages.. Each round both teams have 45 seconds to get their teammates to guess as many characters from the bowl as possible. At the end of 45 seconds it's the other team's turn. You go back and forth going through all the names in the bowl, however the way you get your team to guess changes each round. The first round the person that's up for their team can only say words to describe the person. Obviously if it was Charlie Brown you can't say Charlie Brown. It's like Taboo in that fact. But you can say the Great Pumpkin. Once all the characters have been guessed, gather up the papers and put them back into the bowl for the second round.
The second round (once we go through all of the characters) the person for their team can only act out or mime who the character is. It's slightly easier now that you have a word bank to go off of, but it still gets pretty tricky.
The final round is a single pose.. This one is hard! Again scoop all the papers back into the bowl for the third round and good luck. I had Batman one time I played this and imagine a single pose to do for Batman... I covered my upper face with my hands and made pointy ears with my fingers. Best I could think of!
The winning team is the team that collectively through all the rounds had their team guess the most characters. Try it at your next party, it gets pretty hilarious!
Overall the party was really fun! I'm glad we threw it.. I'll have enough bread bowls and candy to last me til spring haha! Or maybe next week.. I do love soup and candy. ;)
Happy haunting and good luck with all of your party planning!!
xoxo Mandi
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