CarnEvil

We (and by we I mean Mallory) had wanted to do an evil carnival theme for our Halloween party for a while now. So last year, we buckled down and got it done. 

Decorations

We got a jump start on decorating last year. Mallory wrangled her dad, uncle and brother into helping start two of the biggest projects around mid-September. The first was the ticket booth. After all, you can't have a CarnEvil without a ticket booth. Here are pics of our progress:

The bottom was built from pallets and the rest from pieces of scrap wood found around the house.

The biggest cost for the booth itself was for the paint. We bought cheap $10 paint from Walmart.

Kitty wanted to help paint.

We used PVC pipe for the bars. Mallory's dad cut them to fit and then we spray painted them.

For the clown inside the booth, we found a clown costume at Goodwill and stuffed it with hay. Mallory had a Styrofoam head that we put a mask on.

The second larger project was the clown head. We wanted it to hang over the door. We encountered a few problems on the way but in the end it turned out great.

The first thing we did was use a projector to enlarge the clown photo and trace it on an old piece of plywood. 

Next, Mallory's dad cut it out with a jigsaw. 

Then came the painting. We first painted the entire piece white to help hide some of the marks made while tracing. 

Later Mallory's grandma came back and shaded it to make it look scarier. The day of the party we hung it above the door. Beware doing that!! Two people cut their heads open on the clown's teeth coming in and out of the door.  He hung a little too low for the front door.

The other decorations didn't take quite as much time as those two. To get the general circus feel, we cut pieces of red and white table cloths into strips and hung them along the walls.

The process of hanging the sheets did take a while. We hung a few every day for about three days to get them all up.

We decided to have a photo area for the party. We found the idea for making a bulls eye on Pinterest. 

We used a pencil and string as a makeshift protractor to draw circles. It worked for the most part. We did encounter the problem of the thumb tack refusing to stick in the drywall used as the background ($8 at Home Depot) and it was hard to hold onto the string. Close enough anyway.

Once the circles were drawn, we filled them in with leftover red paint.

We made an animal cage out of a cardboard box and dowel rods. The stuffed animals came from Goodwill. We just put a bit of red paint on them to make them look scarier. 

We set up a vendor using our skeleton, George.

And of course a popcorn machine. We used an old fish tank.

We cleaned it up just a bit and put red duct tape (which we got at the Dollar Tree for $1) on the sides.

We put some popcorn and a few rats inside for good measure.

We cut our CarnEvil letters out of cardboard and spray painted them red.

We printed some carnival related pictures and replaced the pictures in Mallory's frames with them. 

We also added a bit of decor to the bathroom. Since the walls were already red and white, we decided to just write a little message in chalk.

And of course, Chucky the clown. 

Another creation brought to you by Mallory's dad was the jack-in-the-box. He built the base from pallets. For the "spring" he used a mop handle and covered it with a washing machine hose. We put the mask on a Styrofoam head and attached it to the top of the mop handle.

We hung black cloths in the bedroom, making a path to the bathroom. Partly to hide all of Mallory's crap, partly because we wanted a black lit room. We bought black lights from Home Depot and put colorful dots on the black table cloths so that they would glow, along with the jack-in-the-box.

Food

We kept the food simple as the party didn't start until 8 p.m. We wanted a simple carnival themed menu. We decided on nachos (rotel dip), caramel popcorn, snow cones and an apple bar. We couldn't find snow cone flavoring anywhere so we bought those non-frozen ice pops. They worked pretty well. Hillary had a snow cone machine that we used to crush the ice.

For the apple base we had different types of apples, chocolate, caramel and peanut butter dips and an assortment of toppings to dip into.

Games

We set up a few carnival games, which we incorporated into one main game: our version of New Girl's True American. In our version, on your team's turn, you spin the wheel to find out what your challenge is. "Trivia" was a Trivia For Dummies question. "Count" relates to the New Girl version where someone counts to four and then everyone holds a number on their head 1-5. Those who matched numbers completed the challenge. "Swap" meant everyone had to switch spaces and "Charades" was just what it sounds like.

Courtney and her dad made the spinning wheel using a plastic lazy susan, dry erase vinyl, tape and a wooden board. We found a tutorial on Pinterest. 

Our three carnival games were ring toss, basket pong and ducks. For the ring toss, we just used empty wine bottles and mason jar lids (sans the flat part) for the rings. For basket pong, I found a bucket already decorated at Goodwill and we used ping pong balls for the tossing.

The ducks, sadly, would not float in our bucket so we had to set them on the bench for our duck game. We burned them with a lighter to give them a more CarnEvil feel and wrote numbers on the bottom 1-16. If you got the duck challenge, someone would call out a number and you had to find that exact number in three tries. Mallory's brother was exceptionally good at this game.

If you failed at your game challenge, you had the chance to Tempt Your Fate to move forward. You simply pop a balloon to reveal your fate.

Fate would either favor you, in which case you got the chance to move on, or fate would frown upon you and you would have to complete a ridiculous challenge, such as doing the chicken dance.

All in all our party turned out very well. With all of our DIY projects, we came out pretty good money wise as well. I'd say around $200. Not bad for an epic Halloween party.