Horcrux Hunt - Escape Room Style Party: 8 Days and Counting!

Party planning is officially DONE. All 6 horcruxes are hidden and I have cataloged every step of every process to solve the hunt. Phew!

Tonight we are having Husband's cousin and a couple of her friends over for a 'beta test' to determine how much time each room will take and if there are any bugs to work out.

A couple extra sneak peek photos...

Crookshanks prowling in Diagon Alley shops. 

The Felix Felicis advertisement was found HERE.

Dark Arts Cabinet Detail

Ollivander's Wand Shop is little changed from Little Tomato's party. We have added a locked box and a fun little fist-shaped pencil cup that I found. 

Ollivander's Wand Shop

A school trunk in the Gryffindor Common Room @ Hogwarts.

Horcrux Hunt - Escape Room Style Party: 11 Days and Counting...

This is definitely my most time consuming party I have every planned... Though we had a LOT of party decorations and props designed for Little Tomato's party, we are certainly going over the top for this one. Our kitchen and dining room tables have been overflowing with craft supplies and projects in progress, but we are checking them off one by one in the last days before the party.

I thought I'd post a few sneak peek pictures, but the full party details will be posted after the party. Since it is an 'escape room style' party, we don't want to give any clues before the guests arrive!

Three Broomsticks Sign

This one has been a work in progress for a while. Apparently insulation foam reacts to spray paint and essentially  'melts'... I tried to save time and spray the sign black (when I've previously used primer + acrylic craft paints). Bad call. 

So... I had to acrylic paint OVER the spray paint, but the sign was definitely bumpy and degraded in areas. I made lemonade out of lemons and added layers of brown 'antique wax' to accentuate the degradation and give it an aged 'rusty' look. It worked out in the end, but it certainly added extra time to getting it done.

Owl Post

Another 'location' in the party is an Owl Post. We have set a table with several packages and letters that are addressed to various students & teachers at Hogwarts, as well as a name or two in Hogsmeade. 

The cabinet behind the table has some open 'box' storage shelves, where there are owls in waiting for their delivery assignments. 

We tucked feathers in a few packages and had a few loose about the table. Owl messaging can get a little messy!

All of the packages are empty cardboard boxes that we had laying around. I am a giant fan of kraft paper. It is an inexpensive material and is like a little black dress, it goes with everything. I bought a 48"W roll almost 4 years ago and it is still going strong. Kraft paper + twine and a few red wax seals to make it pop = Owl Post! 

More later...

Piñata Costume

Last week, Husband and I went to a fundraiser with a ' fiesta' theme. Costumes were encouraged.

I wanted to dress in something fun and different, and saw some really cute piñata costumes on Pinterest. The only thing I didn't like about the costume tutorials I saw online was the fact that they were all made using crepe (or tissue) paper. I didn't want any areas to wear thin from sitting down, and with our rainy weather recently, I definitely didn't want it to start disintegrating on me.

I decided to instead use felt fabric. And being the neurotic crafter that I am, I didn't want to glue the costume together, but chose to sew it together instead. It took a lot longer than anticipated. It was around 50 layers of felt individually sewn into the dress.

Materials:

12" each color x 6 colors of felt.
Thread.
Dress - I used an old jersey maternity dress that I had in the back of my closet.
Scissors.
Sewing machine.

Directions:

Cut the felt into strips. I made my strips approximately 2-1/2" wide (the felt colors I bought at Hobby Lobby weren't perfectly 12", so I couldn't make it a 3" strip).

'Fringe' the individual strips. Just eyeball the cuts to be evenly spaced and cut around halfway up the strips.

Start with the bottom strip, pin it to the dress, and sew it to to the dress. As my dress was jersey and I wanted to maintain some stretch, I used a widely spaced stitch - not quite a basting stitch, but close.

Subsequent strips are spaced to overlap the lower strip by about half. Pin, stitch, repeat.

Once I got to the neckline, I had some leftover pink strips and decided to add a little fringy detail. I sewed two strips together make a pink fringe and pinned and sewed it around the neck.

I took the leftover scraps and hot glued them to a dowel and added a Christmas bow to the top as the piñata stick.

Finally, I took a couple of disposable plastic cups and glued scraps to them. I cut some holes into them and laced them through a headband to make piñata ears.

Katniss Cowl

My Halloween project a few years ago was a Katniss Cowl. I loved the unique look of the cowl, and scoured the internet for an accurate pattern to make it. This week my pictures had popped up in my Facebook feed.

Most of the patterns deviated too much from the original design for my taste. I finally found a design that I liked... but it was more a tutorial than a pattern. Essentially, the design involved a crochet neckline and fishtail braids grafted together. The tutorial can be found here.

The key to giving it the final fitted look is to wear the cowl as you pin the individual braids onto the work-in-progress. I experimented with the number of strands per braid for the correct thickness of each row as well.

The down side to the fishtail braided cowl is that to give the braids the proper thickness, this beast is THICK. It can definitely get warm wearing it.