Party Pics!

I'm horrible at taking photos at events, but here are the six I got. I think we can safely say a great time was had by all!






Next year's theme: Time Warp!

Party Week: Thursday Scenes

Blogger went down last night, so this is yesterday's post, finally up.

My main mission today was to finish painting the graveyard fence black - mission accomplished! Of course I forgot to get a picture, but there will be plenty once we get the tombstones out tomorrow. After letting my hands recover for a bit (I don't love spray paint!), I headed downstairs and set up the autopsy room:
Cool in regular lighting, but way spookier with the red bulb in!
I spent the rest of my time today cleaning, putting totes away and working on the main activity for the party. We're very close to being done with all the scene setting - here are some shots of the pediatrics ward:

Peek-a-BOO!

What's that they're playing with?

We also brainstormed the party ideas our guests will vote on for the 2010 party. The themes are:

Heaven & Hell
Worst Fears/Superstitions
Time Warp

Which one would you vote for?

More to come...

Party Week: Wednesday Report

A lot of cleaning today - putting away unused decorations, getting the glassware rinsed and put out, finishing up the last loads of laundry so I can turn that area into "Autopsy". Not too much to show though...just a quick pic of what I was working on late this afternoon: Sorry, I can't tell you exactly what these are for. Don't want to spoil it for the party guests. I'll let you in on it after the party. Should be pretty fun, I think.

Tomorrow, the weather is supposed to be decent, and I'm headed outside to finish painting the fence, and set up the graveyard in the front yard. Hopefully it won't be too cold. I'd also like to finish up the stuff in the photo above, and maybe get the gift bags done. We'll see how far the day goes.

More tomorrow!

Two Weeks to Party Time!

Everyone should have received their invitation by now, so here's what they ended up looking like. Turned out very well, I think, but I forgot to add that costumes, as always *are* required. Oh well...we'll have plenty of costumes for anyone who "forgets".

We're at crunch time now - and thank goodness we have a three-day weekend to get some things done. Here's what we worked on today:
Brent downloaded some old medical certificates and documents that we replaced the pirate pictures from last year with.
Then I got the Dept. 56 village set up in the living room: Next, a bloody border and some dangling skeletons:
And finally the Lemax village in the basement:
Doesn't sound like much, but we did some cleaning & reorganizing as well. Tomorrow, I think we'll be able to get pediatrics/therapy/surgery mostly done, and some work done on a few more rooms as well.

Still haven't found my Halloween clock though. *sigh* I hope it turns up soon!

Progress on the Fence

Last weekend we made good strides with our new graveyard fence. We started out by cutting all the PVC pipe into three and four foot sections. Then Brent set up a "painting table" out of sawhorses & plywood, and started spraying. It takes a lot of black spray paint to cover white pipe!

Then we cut the furring strips into six foot lengths, and traced nine holes on each. There's Brent, hard at work...
The drill press made drilling the holes go at a fairly fast clip, once we figured out that we needed a sharper bit. Still, it was a lot of holes, so we didn't finish up until late in the evening. Voila - the first small pile of rails drilled and ready for paint. This pile was much larger by the time we got finished.
We did a lot of shopping last weekend too, which I forgot to get photos of, and bought some clay for toes. I'll post pics of those this weekend. We got some new Scene Setters for the operating room (surgery), and a plasma ball (remember those?). We also got some cool salt & pepper shakers, and a nicely spooky napkin holder. We found the shot syringes too, nice not to have to pay shipping for those! I need to mix up some jello shots, and make sure they'll work okay with those.

More to come soon...time is flying right by, and the party is just 5 weeks away! Yikes!

New Graveyard Fencing

Last year on Halloween night, we had problems with parents stepping over our low fence - followed closely by their kids. Because we have all kinds of electrical cords, etc snaked through the lawn decorations, we prefer that kids especially stay out of the graveyard proper, just to keep anyone from tripping & hurting themselves. So we decided it was time for a "proper" graveyard fence.

We got the instructions online (see the HauntProject.com link to the right), and Brent decided to build a panel just to see how it would look, how hard it would be, etc. Turns out it was pretty darn easy, as you can see above. These 6ft panels just stake into the yard with rebar, and are made of 1/2 inch PVC pipe and 2 inch furring strips. Obviously we need finials to put on top of the posts...we're still looking for something suitably haunting.

We need 32 panels to do both halves of our graveyard, so today we bought 90 PVC pipes and 60 furring strips, 2 more boxes of nails and another box of black spray paint. Once all the panels are finished, we'll add some moss & creepy cloth to finish off the look. Can't wait to see what it looks like all put together!

This weekend we also bought bloody tablecloths, and cheap MP3 players with cheap speakers for sound effects around the house. Can't believe we didn't think of it before, but it's the perfect solution for getting specific sound effects to match individual "scenes".

Now if we could just pin down the invitation format...

Don't Forget! Magnets Done.

I finally got our Save the Date magnets done! And I have to say, I think they turned out quite well. We decided to send these out this year in advance of our actual invitations, to both let people know what the theme was early, and to get the date on people's calendars so they could rearrange schedules, find babysitters, etc.

This was one of the easiest things to do for the party. I just made up business cards in publisher with themed images and printed them out on business card stock (perforated, of course). Then I removed the needles from syringes I'd cleaned, and wrapped red thread around the plunger before putting it back in. I stuck the thread on a business card magnet, then the card over the thread. The most time-consuming part of the whole project was getting the business cards lined up well on the magnets!
As you can see, there's no address or name - just a return address on the envelope, and the "Details coming soon" in the corner. Our blog address too, of course - which is new for this year.

We're mailing these out tonight - I hope our guests are as excited as we are for this year's party...