Santa Wreath

I'm sure I saw this on Pinterest, but I apparently didn't pin it because I can find it on any of my boards! Good thing I remembered how to make it!

To make this Santa wreath you will need red and white feather boas (I had to use 3 6ft white boas and 2 6 ft red boas; go figure), wooden letters, black and gold/yellow felt, and a hot flue gun. Oh, and a wreath form.

 Start by wrapping the wreath form with the boas, half white and half red. I cut the black felt into 2 inch strips. It took three strips to make it all the way around the wreath. Hot glue the ends of the strips so that it fits snugly around the wreath. For the buckle, cut the yellow felt into a 2 1/2 inch square, a 2 inch black square, and a 1/2x1 1/2 inch rectangle of yellow. Hot glue pieces together and glue to belt.

Paint your wooden letters; I choose silver. I hot glued these on. You may find it necessary to secure them with thread that is the same color as your letters. Hang it with some ribbon and you're done!

Riddles In The Dark

So, as mentioned in my last post, we had a scavenger hunt at our Middle Earth party based on the Riddles in the Dark. I noticed as I was preparing the images for this post that two of the riddles got run together and I only carved one stamp. Oops!

Here is the riddle sheet they were given. Once they figured out the riddle, they could then look for where the stamp might be. For instance: "wind" was behind a fan in the kitchen and "teeth" were in the bathroom. Two of the stamps required the guest to give the answer to Carma in order to get a clue to find the stamp. This brought our love of letterboxing into the mix.

Here is the sheet again with the answers filled in and the stamps inked on the page.

We were having a problem trying to figure out where to put the fish. Out of nowhere, as fun ideas usually come, I thought: "We should put a bowl of candy fish out for the guests with a sign that says Smeagol's Food and put the stamp behind it!" Needless to say, once people found the stamp, the bowl of candy disappeared fast.

I also carved an additional two stamps to put on salt dough and clay tags/ornaments. The salt dough was too porous to stamp an image on well but the clay tags were perfect. The images are of J.R.R. Tolkien's symbol and the White Tree of Gondor.

I hope you've all enjoyed what we did for our party! Hopefully I've given some ideas for anyone planning a party of their own!

A Middle Earth Party

Well, the party came and went and I'm still exhausted! I still have pretty much everything to put away from the party! It's always well worth it when everyone has a good time. I'm going to just get right down to what we did!

I had two wonderful co-hosts, Carma and Amy. Amy made some great signs for around the house (thank you Mom and Dad for letting us use your house!), and she also made made a wonderful backdrop for photos. I'm sad to say we didn't get around to taking photos in front of it, but it made for excellent decoration.

Amy also had a large map of Middle Earth printed up, which we did use for photos.

Photo by Becca Robins Photography

I'm sure dwarves wore bandanas, right?

Photo by Becca Robins Photography

I had made some dwarf beards for props. We also utilized the invisibility cloak from our Harry Potter party so that it could be an elven cloak. My nephew was kind enough to let us use his bow as well for photos.

The Crafts:

I prepared four crafts to be done. I had them make an arrow, which turned out to be the hardest craft to make. The guests definitely have a good idea of how hard it was to make arrows and they understand why they would retrieve as many as they could after hunting or a battle.

I found a tutorial for the arrows on Entropy House. The only thing I did differently was the tip. I had my amazing father cut the notches in the dowels for me. I had him cut a notch in the end for the tip about 1/2 in deep. Instead of using foam, I found some wooden hearts that we painted silver and then hot glued them into the one end.

The hardest part was getting the feathers glued on strait. I had prepared the feathers per the tutorial so all the guests had to do was glue them on then wrap the thread around, but the feathers were slightly curved. It ended up taking one person to hold the dowel and one person to glue the feather on. I somehow managed to do mine myself and my feathers ended up strait!

Another of the crafts was making leather stamped bracelets. I had a list of Tolkien quotes that they could choose from.

"Not all who wander are lost." -J.R.R. Tolkien

The third craft was to make magnets. I printed out maps of Middle Earth and had them place flat backed marbles over the names of places. They traced the marbles and cut out the areas they had selected. They used their finger to wipe E6000 (glue) onto the back of the marble and place the marble on the cut-out of the map. I had round, flat magnets there that they then wiped glue on and put the marble on that.

I could not get a clear picture of the magnets. I tried different angels and surfaces, but this is the best I could get. They're the four round ones in the center. 

The last craft was to make the mallorn leaf wrappers and lembas bread. This tutorial, along with the recipe for the bread, can also be found on Entropy House.

Making lembas bread

Games

We didn't want everything to be crafts, so we came up with a scavenger hunt based on the Riddles in the Dark. I will do a separate post next week on this called "Riddles in the Dark."

We also had a raffle for a $10.00 movie gift card and a replica of the One Ring.

Food

Our party went through the lunch hour, so we decided to have stew. Our reason behind this? Po-tah-toes! Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew! So, that's exactly what we did!

For dessert, we had cupcakes with these cute rings in them!


Everyone had fun and went away with a bag full of crafts. Carma and I will now be planning our next big party: Hunger Games. I warned her that someone would ask us to do a HG themed party, and sure enough, my sister asked!