A Carnival Themed Party!

Throwing parties is one of those things that keeps me alive, as ridiculous as that may sound. I love the planning and the preparation. I love the stress the day of the party, and the relief when people come, and the happiness I get from people around me being happy.

Never did I ever think I'd end up being a party planner type of girl. In high school I was insecure and scared. I wasn't some girl who could throw a party where people would have fun and actually show up. Never. I guess now that I'm in college--almost done with college, crazily enough--I've found this confidence in myself that I didn't know I had. It comes from a lot of good friends who I'm totally myself around and who I have fun with. It comes from amazing roommates who are my best friends and my soul sisters. I thank God every single day for them in my prayers because I'm so lucky to have people like them in my life. And it comes from the fact that I really do like myself right now, and to an extent, I don't care what people think of me. Especially not as much as I did in high school.

I've realized that doing what makes me happy is the best feeling in the world, so I try not to stop myself from doing those things.

This party was a fun one. I loved planning it, down to the details of the food, games, and decorations. I had a difficult time finding any carnival-themed printables on pinterest, so I made my own using Picmonkey, and they turned out fabulous. I set up a photobooth, complete with props like hipster glasses, speech bubbles, and mustaches (as much as I am tired of the mustache trend, they make for excellent and hilarious photo booth props). People that I knew and didn't know came and went. We had loud music going with some people dancing the whole night, some of us talking and then dancing, and others just enjoying being there socializing by the fire pit, the games, the photobooth, or the concessions. I wish I had taken more pictures of them, but we had carnival games lining the wall, like a ring toss (water bottles and bracelets), a clothespin drop (trying to drop a clothespin into a thin vase), and a fortune teller (magic 8 balls). If I hadn't been hosting the party, I definitely would have done face painting too. It was a delightful night and everyone who came had a good time.

See, that's the thing about parties, is that they make other people happy. And making other people happy makes me happy. Therefore, throwing parties make me exceptionally happy. See for yourself, and next time I throw one and you're in Provo, you should definitely come. :)

*If you want any copies of the printables, feel free to email me and I will send them to you!

**And if you want to read about any of the other parties I've thrown, the links are below:

Harry Potter Party

Hunger Games Party

Halloween Party

[Halloween Party 2012] Decorations

Throwing a Halloween party is kind of the best, because you can go totally all out with decorations. And since I threw this party in our back patio, the possibilities were made even more endless (within in my poor college student budget). I found a lot of cheap decorations or made them myself.

I found spider webs at the dollar store and strung them all over the walls, which really brought the creepy mood. These were really easy to put up, since all the walls surrounding our patio outside were brick. I just kind of pulled the webs along and they stuck all over the place. It gave everything a really cool effect.

I also bought 50 pages of black cardstock for $2, found a bat outline online, and then cut them out and taped them all over. The bats took quite a while to cut out, but the great thing about those is that I can reuse them every year, so it was definitely worth it.

My mom was awesome and let me borrow these fun pumpkin lights. I also went to Walmart and bought a ton of lights. They were only $3-4 a box so it was really cheap, and once again worth it since I would be able to reuse them. I got some orange and purple lights, and since Christmas decorations come out in stores around the same time as Halloween, I was able to get a bunch of just plain white lights too. I strung these all across the patio so it looked really cool. They kept falling down though so next time I'd probably just string them around the walls, instead of across them, to make life easier for myself.

I made signs for everything through Picmonkey, because it was free, and they had a lot of fun Halloween fonts and overlays you could use. "Roast a Ghost" was for the firepit (marshmallows=ghosts). There will be more pictures of it later, but for the "photobooth" I used an orange tablecloth as the background and then just set up my tripod with my little kodak easy share camera. It was right by the entrance so people took photos as they came in and just operated it themselves, so it worked out well.

I found the printables for this banner here and I also found the other posters just by searching online and on pinterest. You can see my Halloween board here for all the ideas I had pinned. I got the tableclothes from the dollar store for $1 each and I think the whole look turned out really fun. The banner was definitely one of my favorite parts of the decorations.

And that's pretty much the rundown for the decorations! Sorry, I don't remember where I got all of my printables, but I definitely don't claim the credit for them (just the signs I showed above), so if they are yours and you would like credit, just comment and I will be sure to link you up. :)

[Hunger Games Party] Set-Up and Decorations

So as people came into our apartment, this is what they would have seen (with the exception of the sign being so curled, I took this picture the morning after and I guess it was a little rainy that night). We covered our apartment number with a district 12 sign and also had an invitation/announcement on the door. This is how all the other apartment doors in our complex looked as well when we went around to deliver invitations the Tuesday before the party (which was on a Saturday).

When guests walked into our apartment, they saw this:

For the apartments in our complex, those people were in whatever district their apartment number was. The rest of the people I decided to just divide it by birthday month and it worked out really well, considering there are twelve months in a year and twelve districts haha.

Just like we did for our Harry Potter party, we covered the walls in tablecloths we bought from the dollar store. To incorporate the coal/fire trade of district 12, I bought yellow, orange, white and black tablecloths. It worked out well and we still had our old Christmas lights out so we strung those all around too and it looked fun.

On the wall we had all the twelve district posters up to show what each one's trade was. Also randomly scattered about on the walls were some capitol propaganda posters (like this, this, and this).

For some reason one string of lights wasn't working :/

I know I showed this picture in the food post already but I felt like it might be necessary to show how we set it up. We had our table of food in the corner and also put the drinks on the counter. We happened to have all the plants already but they added a nice touch.

And the tree...let's just say we've had it since November and never got rid of it so we decided to make it part of the decorations. I have to admit, that as much as I currently hate that tree, it added a nice touch to the decorations.

And to honor President Snow, we had white flowers strewn about on the table, in the tree, and this one hanging from the ceiling fan. I thought it was the perfect thing. I just got two bunches of them from the dollar store which gave me about twelve flowers.

If you want to read about all the other aspects of the party, just click on the links below!

Invitations

Food

Party Day

Costumes

[Ultimate Harry Potter Party] The Set-Up/Decorations

Ok this post is going to be a quickie because I'm tired. Sorry it's being posted so late!

So our set-up had to be fairly simple, considering we live in an apartment that isn't huge and is definitely more than 20 years old. Yes. So we did the best we could. We got tablecloths from the dollar store and covered the walls to make it look like the gryffindor common room. I printed out these cool posters and we put them on the wall to add a little more. We also got cobwebs and put them around the room and yellow and red crepe paper to put on the ceiling.

We were so exhausted after the party! This is the best picture I got of the whole set-up of the room.

Hogwarts house posters

I already showed pictures of the food but I figured I'd show these two again since they did have to do with the set-up of the party.

The Sorting Hat: We found this old black hat at DI (a thrift store--they're all over Utah) by "sheer dumb luck" (who said that in Harry Potter?! ;)). It didn't look exactly like the sorting hat in the movie or anything, but it definitely worked and served it's purpose. When people walked in, they reached into the hat, pulled out a house badge and then pinned it on themselves. Later on, the badges served a purpose when we played Harry Potter charades against houses (more on that next time).

Closer look at the sign

My roommate Kelsey is an art major (and in the BFA program!) and was awesome enough to draw a picture of the fat lady to put on the door! It turned out super sweet and she seriously got it done in like 15-20 minutes. Amazing, right??

Ha, we made a sign that said, "This Way to the Ministry of Magic" for the bathroom, since that's how people traveled to the Ministry in the books and movie. Clever! I found the idea from Pinterest and the original link is here. This is my friend Lauren pretending to travel to the Ministry of Magic!

And then...we have the animals... ;) So there's this museum on campus called the Bean Museum where they have TONS of dead animals that have been stuffed and put on display. Like these were all real animals at one point in time. Crazy, right?! They let you rent out a few animals for free (it's just like renting a library book) and you can get up to 10 if you want. Our original plan was to get owls, but when we got to the museum, they were all checked out! :( So then we decided to get the different house animals--a snake, raven, badger (except I think it was a wolverine, we just called it a badger, and a lion. Ha and Kelsey got a penguin as you can see in the picture and they even had a toad so we got that too and named him Trevor. :)

Honestly, when we were first getting them and putting them in my car, I didn't even want to touch them because I was so grossed out. Real animals that were now dead! Um...no. But then we had to carry them inside so I had to get over my high-maintenance ways and do it. And now..the animals are practically family because they've been in our apartment for almost a week!

Getting the animals from the museum into my car!

House animals

 My friend Lauren (picture above as Professor Trelawney) actually got two owls for us from the museum that morning (that's why there were no owls there!) and brought them with her when she came. They definitely completed the party! You can also see Trevor the Toad in the corner. We addressed an envelope to Albus Dumbledore and put it in the owl's beak.

 Now we just have eight dead, stuffed animals around our apartment...no big deal, right??

Read tomorrow to hear about the actual party!! Last Harry Potter party post! :( I hope you are enjoying hearing about the party as much as I am loving writing about it!!

[Budget]
Decorations: about $15 (for the tablecloths, spiderwebs, sorting hat, and the cost to print out the badges and posters)
Food: $52.85
Invitations: $18
Total: $85.85

To read the other posts about the party, click on these links:

Food

Invitations
Party Day!