DIY Carnival

I, along with helpers, decided to throw an activity at church that was family friendly and more geared toward your inner kid. We decided to do an indoor carnival. So, I'm including some tips of making your own carnival too! This could be indoor or outdoor. This was a while ago and the weather still wasn't as reliable as we wanted for something outdoor. Anyways, here we go!

These were our booths:

• Duck Pond -pick up a duck, if it has an "X" on the bottom you win a prize!

• Cupcake Walk-Number spaces 1-8. The contestants walk around the spaces while music plays. When the music stops hope your number is called from the mystery hat

 

• Can Toss-We used tennis balls against 6 stacked cans. Get them all down for a prize.

 

• Target Practice-Get a set amount of points in 3 throws for a prize.

• Kissing Booth-guess how many Hershey's Kisses are in the jar (we had 3 jars and differing amounts. Each jar had it's own separate guesses)
• Face Painting-we bought a simple pack at Wal-Mart. It didn't dry very quickly so I would do better research on that!

Here's some additional ideas for booths:

• Fortune Teller-fortune cookies or someone dressed up and has a fun imagination
• Go Fish-attach a string with a magnet at the end to a stick. "Go fishing" behind a curtain or in a baby pool with cut out fish with a paper clip attached so the magnet will stick. 3 tries for a fish!
• Ring Toss-rings and glass soda bottles or pegs, get the ring on the bottle and win
• Balloon Dartboard-Tap small balloons onto a board in a grid and pop with darts. Careful of pointy darts!
• Spin Wheel with a bunch of different prizes 

Food:

Now as for food. Since this was an indoor carnival, popcorn would be a bit too messy. We opted for other carnival food. In a crockpot we stacked hot dogs standing up and cooked them on HIGH for 1.5 hours and they were ready to serve! That's all it took. We fit 75 into a medium sized crockpot. We served with chips and had a potluck for desserts. So yummy and VERY successful way to do a lot of food at once. Although we opted to save money and not to this, certain companies rent out cotton candy machines for as low as $25 a day! I know some Uhauls offer rentals, just go see if your local one does!

Prizes:

• Our prizes were just candy but if you wanted to go all out here are some other ideas
• Restaurant Gift Cards
• Stuffed Animals
• Blow-up Toys (like guitars or saxophones)
• Bouncy Balls
• Temporary Tattoos
• Bubbles
• Nail Polish
• So much more! Just go to your Dollar Store, I'm sure they have tons of "prize" worthy stuff

All in all, we budgeted for about $150 and we got right around there. In addition to the supplies for each booth (rubber ducks, face paint, tarp, etc) and prizes we also bought table cloths, balloons, printed signs, and the food. We did this in our church's gym which supplied tables and chairs for free.

Oh yeah! I made a cool invitation too:

Download the font here! I promise it's safe and didn't give my computer some weird virus. This is for the carnival like font. And I found the picture of the tents online just looking up clip art.

Valentine's Day Party

Last year we were inspired by Jaime to throw a Valentine's Day party. We wanted this to become an annual thing but this year Valentine's Day is a week before my due date so we opted out of this year's celebration. But anywho! Here's some of the fun things we did last year:

The Dollar Store was the perfect place for the decorations (some pictured below.) They had plenty of items that were Valentine's day themed including the napkins, plates, fabric rose petals and doily hearts that we got. With the doorway decorations I cut rectangles and squares from red cardstock and wrote love, kissy, and xoxoxo with one letter per square then threaded them with red thread and viola, doorway garland!

Games:
the Newlywed Game,
Battle of the Sexes,
Guess the Famous Couple through hints,
make a story with 10 conversation hearts,
love song charades (whichever couple could guess 2 songs in the shortest amount of time won),
and a group mad lib (on strips of paper were written adjective, noun, etc and were put into a mad lib which was hilarious!)

The food had to be within the theme of course. We included on the invitations for our party guests to bring a treat that was red or pink.

Treats We Made:
Of course I didn't take hardly any pictures especially of the food...
Sliced red potatoes with sprinkled cheese and bacon bits on them (and baked for 15 min at 400)
We did a red fruit platter with Cool Whip for a dip
Pink Rice Krispie Treats
Ok, we didn't make these but we did supply hot tamales and red hots...YUM

Treats that were brought:
Strawberry Kiwi drink
Pink Oreo truffles
Chocolate covered strawberries
Cinnamon sugar donut holes
Brownies
Red and pink trifle (which won the prize for best treat which included taste and overall pinkness)

We gave out prizes for some of the games and treats. The prizes were:
Newlywed game: My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Famous Couples: Gossip magazine
Best treat: Oven mitt with matching hand towel with a large french chef
Love song charades: lollipops (get it? Pop stars?)

What do you like to do for Valentine's Day? Go out to dinner? Netflix night?

I tried to figure this out but just couldn't. If anyone knows how to embed a PowerPoint into your blog post let me know and I can share our Newlywed and Battle of the Sexes games!

The Queen of Hearts Party: The Games

I think one of the most important parts of party planning is the games or activities planned for the evening. The decor could be great, but if there isn't a lot of mingling, people will leave early. So my party planning crew and I worked hard to make sure these activities would be enjoyable.

We had two games at the party. The first turned out to be the main event. As people were arriving we had them pick a card. Each suit then became a different team, breaking up couples and mixing people up. When all the guests were there and most people had a little something to eat, we announced the game. Each team was given its own work space (table). On the table they found a brown paper bag with the supplies for the game and directions. I've found that you will have to explain the game at least three times but with written rules/directions you will only explain them once and then you just refer them to the written directions! The activity, was of course, building a house of cards. We gave each team two decks of cards, tissue paper, pipe cleaners, dry pasta, marshmallows and a glue gun. They were to build their house on a foam board, purchased from Dollar Tree. The teams were instructed they would judged on structural integrity, height and ascetics. We gave the groups a little over thirty minutes to construct their houses and had a dramatic countdown during the last 10 seconds. When time was up we yelled "Hands off!" a couple of times, just like on those Food Network challenge shows. We had each team present their creation and explain their inspiration, etc. We had everything from Ghostbusters Stay Puft Marshmallow Man to a Scotland castle represented! Each team took a picture with their creation and then we broke out the measuring tape to see just how tall each of them were.. Finally, an "earthquake" was simulated for each house to test its structural integrity. (Bragging: my husband's team's house withstood 10 seconds of the craziest earthquake you've ever seen. We deemed it indestructible). We awarded each team points according to height, aesthetics and structural integrity. Judging was tough but really fun too!

This was the best part of the party, because it got people talking and mingling. It involved both the guys (building) and gals (creative). And got people working together. It was so fun to watch and the party planning crew was giddy to see how much fun people were having. 

Our second activity was fun but not as big of a hitl. We had 42 guests at the party, which was a large crowd. It worked well for the house of cards game, but not as well for the second game we played, which we called Two of a Kind. There were three rounds to this game. For each round, each team had to have a set of partners come up to contend. We set up around a card table, with each set of partners on a side. The partners linked arms and then had to complete an activity using their free or outside arms The first to finish the activity earned 25 points for their team. The first round we had them stack 10 conversation hearts on top of each other. The second, tie a shoe. The their was the most entertaining, put a diaper on a baby doll. One team thought they'd won, but we stated they were disqualified for having the baby doll's arm through the leg hole of the diaper =) In the end we thought this activity was fun, but with this large of a group, people were done with games and just wanted to eat and socialize. Lesson learned!

 

In the end we awarded the prizes for the best outfit for each suit. They were given a goodie bag and a necklace with a playing card on it (they were actually for Mardi Gras but were perfect and at Dollar Tree, so I had to get them). We then announced how each team did in both games. The overall winner was then awarded a box of chocolates! 

As you can tell, the decor and games weren't all that Valentines-y so this would be a great theme for a party any time of year! It's also great for both single people and married people. We had fun and are excited for next year's Valentine's Day Party!