Halloween Happiness

My lil' crew have had a bit of silly Halloween happiness these past few days. The lead up was fun preparing decorations and thinking up food ideas. Georgie missed having 'school friends' over for a birthday party this year as she hadn't yet started school after relocating from the United Kingdom to New Zealand. So we thought it might be fun to have a bit of an impromptu gathering for Halloween. I was a little nervous as I've never had a Halloween party before and our place in the UK was a little small for entertaining of any sort really, so I'm sooo out of practice. But I braved it and we had a really fun night. Here's a little photo montage of our silly fun...

Here's my crew in their Halloween costumes ready to receive trick or treaters. Fair to say, Zachy gave more than one group a bit of a fright. He was so cute in his get up. Totally his idea to use that mask when he saw it in Dad's dress up stuff. I wouldn't have chosen that, but he rocked it!

A little while later, he decided he should try on Papa's horsehead, but he's seriously too cute to spook!!!

I got a little carried away with the theme. I even pimped the toilet! But it was super fun having a bit of a laugh as we prepped all the different aspects for the party. The soap dispenser wasn't perfect, but I'll improve on it next year.

     

The monster in the toilet and the ghost soap dispenser.

 I had some help with the spooking from a few little friends.
     

     
The kids were greeted by these guys as they came up the stairs to the TV room.


 The kids were super impressed by the Giant Spider on the ceiling

   
Moomin was in charge of the Halloween movie treats

My beautiful niece rocking the sassy witch look with green hair!

I'm not a great baker or cook, so I found simple ways of making the Halloween food a bit 'sleuky' (Georgie's baby word for scary, it's so cute, it's stuck!) I made Spider Pizzas, Mini Jack-o-Lanterns, Oreo Cookies guarded by an Oreo Spider and Witches heads made from mini pavlovas, chocolate cookies, mini mallowpuffs (a New Zealand cookie) and Hershey's chocolate kisses, with black liquorice hair and whip-cream glue.

     

     
Go on, take an Oreo, if you dare!

Residing over the table, ready and waiting to take your order, was this lil' Witchy Waitress, drawn by one of my favourite crafty artists, Krista Smith from Saturated Canary.

So glad I brought home the kids trick or treat buckets from England, which actually made really fun chip buckets this year! Thank you Marks & Spencer's! So miss that store.

Even the juice boxes got the friendly ghost treatment

The Witches who came to tea.

I ran a couple of competitions for the party. Best costume and a colouring competition using a sweet image from Sylvia Zet of Wee Stamps. With her kind permission, I was allowed to use the image for the kids to have a go at colouring her sweet witch 'Hazel'. They were all so good, but I managed to narrow the win down to three, which I thought was pretty good.

These were the entries for the colouring competition

Here's our costume competition winner flanked by my kids.

Finally, I had a little 'stand' with the take home goodies and the prize wins by the front door. I was canny and managed to pick up this stand on Halloween Thursday from our local Warehouse store, as all the candy had sold out and it was likely headed for the trash! It had some cute lil' bats on it and a couple of fun skeletons, which just added to our Halloween decoration stash. It looked great sat by the front door to give the kids their treats as the parents came to collect them.

This lil' bat box I made for the winner of the costume competition. My Zachy was heartbroken when I gave it away, as he had been convinced it was for him! Such a sad sweet moment. I hadn't realised he'd made this attachment to it! So I've promised to make him another one! This lil' box was filled with bat droppings, ahem, Maltesers.

This was the colouring competition prize along with a bookmark I made and laminated which you can see in the picture above. There were two, one for each competition. I seriously have spent way too much time on Pinterest lately, ghost poo, hehehe.

Family and friends, I hope you enjoyed seeing our Halloween fun today. I've stashed some of the decorations for next year, so let's see if I can go one better then! Ciao, Wends xxx

Quick update: I made up Zachy's little bat box today, sweet wee guy, really was so crushed when that got given away in the prizes. So here's his lil' batty...

(I tried taping down the front flap first, which has ruined the ink finish sadly, but he's 3, so unlikely he'll notice! Taped the underside afterwards, which is what I should have done in the first place!)