Plan a Pumpkin Carving Party

Oh, October.  It’s such an animated time of year with bustling ideas, parties, and fun.  Childhood-like energy vivaciously radiates through joyful smiles.  Adults passionately reminisce their childhood days as they blissfully entice little ghosts and goblins with both tricks and treats.  Pumpkins and scarecrows eagerly collect their sweet treats with spooky smirks. Everyone – young and young at heart, finds enjoyment in the frightening fun of happy hauntings and petrifying parties!

Host a Pumpkin Carving Party!

October is adorned with straw, warm colored mums, gourds, and pumpkins. What better way to decorate your haunted house than with a pumpkin, perfectly carved out by your munchkin. Watch the faces of your favorite little ghouls light up with excitement when they come to your pumpkin carving party!

Get as creepily creative as you’d like!

Carve Out Your Invites:

When planning a pumpkin carving party, it is important to set the date to your evening of thrills.

• Consider a night when the weather is not too brisk, you’ll likely want to host the fun in your garage for easy clean up, and you’ll avoid the hands of your little ones getting too cold while they are playing in the pumpkin goo. The weather may be unavoidable in the event you want to show off your creativity at Halloween; pumpkins don’t last long once they’ve been carved.
• Purchase and prepare your Halloween party invites with details. Don’t forget to include RSVP information; you’ll need it to prepare your party.
• Send out your party invites to all of your guest goblins.

Planning For Your Party:

Give your little werewolf something to howl about!

After your guest goblins have returned their RSVPs, it is time to prepare for your party.

• Stop by your local Farmer’s Market and purchase one carving-size pumpkin for each of your guests. You may want to have a couple extra on hand, too. If you don’t use them at the party, you can always place them out to embellish your home during the holidays.
•  Pick up some pumpkin carving kits – remember to have enough carving utensils on hand for each of your guests.
• Decorate your garage into a Halloween scene with fun room transformers such as Jack O Lantern Scene Setters or Pumpkin Paper Lanterns.  Let your creativity be your guide!
• Add some fun to the party and lay out some pumpkin shaped goodie bags for the guest goblins.  Include nose glasses and Halloween party favors.
• Jazz up your party with some eerie edibles – try your bones at making a pumpkin cake (you can add some fun with an iridescent Jack O Lantern pan). Remember your Halloween themed plates, napkins, tableware, and plastic ware if you will have edibles.
• Let your heart go wild; just don’t let the vampires in!

Your Pumpkin Carving Party:

• For easy clean up, lay a large tarp down on your garage floor. When the evening is over, you will have less gooey pumpkin guts to worry about.
• Consider decorating a corner of the garage with little hay stacks and straw or potting plants of mums. Place the pumpkins in a pile to create a pumpkin patch. Let the kids have fun picking their favorite pumpkin.
• You may even want to set the mood of the party by playing a Halloween CD.
• Let your guests have a gooey good time carving their pumpkin!

After your little goblin guests have finished with their spooky carving fun, let them take their personalized pumpkin home as a party favor. You will likely be the hit of Halloween!

Happy Haunting!

Decorating for Halloween 2012

Decorations change with times and tastes, but the basics remain the same. Evaluate the room you’re decorating for size and setup, then select your pieces working from large Halloween decorations down to the accents. Be sure to incorporate Halloween party supplies that are new for 2012 as well as those that are just new boo to you!

Halloween Walls
Your choices in decorating walls range from fabrics to patterned papers to murals. Think about covering the wall that stands opposite the entrance, and placing free-standing Halloween decorations in front of it for depth. One setup we like this year is to hang a Cemetery Gates illustration in the largest size the wall (and your budget) allows, and placing a pair of zombie silhouettes or tombstones in front of it. Silhouettes work even in a smaller room – some might eat brains but never a lot of precious floor space! Experiment with different illustrations and silhouettes.

Halloween Entrances
Another spot for a large decoration is the main entrance. For 2012 we like a spider web door topper/entrance or a five-foot corex lighted skull from our collection of outdoor Halloween decorations. Keep in mind that just because something is tough enough to withstand October weather doesn’t mean it can’t be used indoors! Think about using them on the inside of the doorway so guests can enjoy them all evening long.

Halloween Centers
If your space is large enough, you’ll want a large decoration right in the center that everyone can see from anywhere in the room. This could be a chandelier or other large hanging decoration, a large free-standing decoration, or both. We really like trees for Halloween 2012 because there is such a wonderful selection of styles and materials, and sizes go all the way to the magnificent Spooky Balloon Tree from Halloween Props that is 8’X8’ when fully assembled.

You can incorporate trees into smaller spaces as well. Just choose skinnier trees, put them in corners or flank doorways with them.

Halloween Lighting
A Halloween party is one of the events where we usually are looking to provide subdued and/or flickering lighting. Find Halloween-themed lanterns, string lights and a darling lighted ghost (which would look terrific in a grouping with one of the above-mentioned trees) in Halloween Lights, but do visit Boo-tique for some imposing and deliciously creepy tabletop candelabra, too.

Halloween Finishes
Finish the rest of your walls and windows with cutouts, garland, or drapes of spider-patterned gossamer.

Try to incorporate little surprises into your decorating, such as customized bottle labels that coordinate with the décor, or radiant balloon lights (which cannot be seen in black balloons, but work fine with other colors of latex balloons).

Five Alternative Themes for Parties at Halloween

Traditional Halloween parties seem to all go the same way. There’s bobbing for apples, drinking cider, jack-o-lanterns adorning every table and lots and lots of orange and black. Been there, done that. Try something different this year for your Halloween celebration and have an alternative Halloween party your guests will be talking about for years to come!

Celebrity Party
Whether it’s Lady Gaga or Michael Jordan, everyone has a favorite celebrity they would love to be if even just for a day. Help your guest’s dreams come true by having a celebrity-themed Halloween party! Roll out the red carpet for your guests as they arrive, and be sure to take lots of pictures in true paparazzi style. Have elegant hours devours prepared, popular music and be sure to give away Hollywood awards for the best celebrity look-alikes. This theme can be done with adults and/or children and is especially good for the party host who wants to steer clear of anything scary for their Halloween party.

Vampire Party
There’s no doubt that vampires have reached insane levels of popularity over the past couple of years, and Halloween is the perfect time to throw a vampire party- no humans allowed! Make sure your guests grab their white vampire fangs and prepare for a night of fun with fellow vampires. Set the mood with organ music or have your favorite vampire movie playing. Send your guests home with candies covered in Halloween favor wrappers they won’t find anywhere else! Depending on how much you get into the vampire and blood theme, this party is still probably best for adults only.

Halloween Hoedown
Not everyone is into the spook and gore of Halloween, so why not throw a non-threatening Halloween Hoedown? Greet your cowboy-hat and boot-wearing guests at a barn entrance  and direct them to the fun inside. Play your favorite country music and leave plenty of room for line dancing. Guests old and young will get a kick out of glass boot mugs they can take home to remember the party throughout the year. This non-threatening Halloween theme will leave your guests feeling light-hearted instead of spooked out.

Decade Party
Hulahoop back to the 50’s. Flashback to the 80’s. Take your Halloween guests to a decade they haven’t visited in years. The key to this party is your groovy music CD.  Play favorite songs from your chosen decade and watch your guests reminisce about old times. Have friends and family bring pictures of themselves from past decades and put them into a box as they arrive. Display the pictures and see if your guests can pick each other out from the wall of photos. Your peace sign danglers fit any retro party and leave your guests feeling like they’ve gone back in time.

Wild about Halloween
Unleash your inner animal at a safari-themed Halloween party. Guests of all ages can dress as their favorite animal, or make things really interesting by telling people what animal they have to dress up as! Decorate your venue with animal print party balloons and literally make everything – from the invitations to the giraffe print cups – in the animal print of choice. Play a game of animal charades and watch your guests fall over in laughter as they watch each other imitate wild animals.

Let your October imagination run wild with unique, Halloween theme parties!

Host a Halloween Ball – Ghoulish Ideas

Calling all ghouls, ghosts, and goblins to a grossly gruesome gathering! Royalty are not the only ones who want to go to the Ball, host a Halloween Ball. Create a creepy atmosphere with a variety of different types of Halloween party supplies to transform your home or party space into a ghastly Halloween bash.

Outdoor Halloween Décor
Start the Halloween haunting in the front yard with an assortment of outdoor Halloween decorations! Beckon the spooks with an eerie graveyard kit. Be sure to strategically place a personalized tombstone yard sign in the graveyard to declare that the guests have arrived dead on at the ghoulish get-together. Cover up front windows with plastic window scenes, window posters (Sinister Sid and Grim Reaper), and freak out your creepy guests with a motion detection haunted house 666 sign that spins the third number from a 9 to a 6, while it plays thunder and lightning sounds. Post a tattered “Enter at your own Risk” banner over the front door for an additional outdoor accent.

Indoor Halloween Décor
Put a spooky touch on every room that the Halloween Ball guests are going to haunt with fantastic Halloween party décor. In the “ball room”, deck out the ceiling with orange and black twirly whirlys, and give additional light to the room by adding a few Halloween LED lanterns. In the middle of the space, hang a spider web canopy to create a creepy chandelier look. This freaky decoration has gnarly posable legs and eyes that light up. To convert walls to match your Halloween décor, cover them with black gossamer fabric.The gothic mansion scene setter portraits are perfect for a main hallway or a large open wall. In the lavatory, give your guests a fright with the zombie hand peel’n place toilet topper. This vinyl low stick adhesive decoration looks like a zombie hand is reaching out of the toilet bowl filled with blood. You can even decorate the refrigerator with a disgusting Halloween refrigerator door cover. The cover features a freezer panel with a frozen head and assorted parts. The refrigerator panel pictures a mixture of unsavory decaying food, worms, and various specimens.

Halloween Tableware
Cover all of the tables with black gossamer and an overlay of spider web patterned gossamer. Place a haunted house glitter centerpiece in the middle of the tables, surrounded by dreary glitter leaf table sprinkles. The scary silhouettes dinner plates, napkins, and cups are a great Halloween tableware choice for your party. At the serving table, attach a bloody gauze panel to the top of the black gossamer, and then position a black tabletop Halloween tree as the centerpiece.

For a real thrill, put the meat market value pack of bloody body parts on a platter with a cover. Have guests touch the items without seeing them, and then try to guess what they are touching. Be sure to play fun music and include songs like the Monster Mash. Let your ghoulish creativity rise and be brought forth from your inner being!