Mourning Party

Regency zombie photo bomb!

The highlight of the Costumer's Lost Weekend for me was the Mourning Party. This was the one part of the event that I was in charge of planning, and I had a crazy amount of fun working with my fellow guild members to come up with ideas and make all the delightfully morbid decorations for the party.

We drew inspiration from Victorian Spiritualism for some of our activities, so we had our very own fortune teller, the Mysterious Madame Cyn (wwooooOOOOooooo!!!), who would do readings for our partygoers. I was so busy with other things that I never got a reading myself, and I am totally brokenhearted about that, but everybody else seemed to really love it. Hopefully I'll get another chance to consult with our official Guild Gypsy at some point in the future.

Oh no - trouble in the future?

We also set up a photo booth and had a ball taking some of our own Victorian-style ghost and mourning photos. I'll post more on this later today - there are just too many great pics to show you all of them here!

In the middle of the room, we had a table set up for people to make their own costumer voodoo doll pincushions. We labeled the dolls with our worst sewing demons, like "sleevils", "missing pattern pieces", "wonky hems", etc. Hopefully, we now can stab these pesky problems with pins and drive the bad sewing juju away! Some of the dolls were absolutely hilarious - I wish I had taken pictures of them all!

For the party decorations, I went to a cemetery and did a bunch of tombstone rubbings, which was such fun little project!  You can barely see them in the photos since we weren't allowed to hang them on the walls, but they made me happy, and hopefully they added a little to our mourning atmosphere.

I also made a bunch of miniature silhouettes to hang from a dead tree centerpiece, which was another fun project that you can't really see much of in these photos.  The rest of the decorations mostly came from candles, spray-painting a lot of random decorative junk black, and lots of creative draping of black fabric everywhere.  Oh yeah, and one FABULOUS skeleton chaperone to keep an eye on the party!  

I had so much fun at the party and time went WAY too fast!  I really wish I could rewind the evening and do it all over again.

As you can see, I fail at mourning poses!  

To be continued...