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!