A British Themed Halloween Party

This past Halloween (sorry for such a delay on posting) I co-hosted a British themed Halloween party. We called it a fancy dress party, as that means costume in England. Everyone tried to come as something English. A friend was the Queen, I was Sherlock Holmes, another friend's boyfriend was also Holmes, my sister was Amy Pond from Doctor Who, etc. While we did this for Halloween, you can always use some of these ideas for any England-themed party.

My friend who came as the Queen made the fun flag and banner you see in the photos above for decoration. We attached the flag to the front of the kitchen table where all the snacks were, so it looked really cute.

The same friend made these cute brownies with flag toppers on a few. Each brownie also had red, white, and blue sprinkles to match the flag. I thought they were adorable!

Below you will find some more shots of the decorations. We used a mix of simple Halloween decorations, as well as English items (like dvds and books laid out).

And now on to the food! I got the Frankenstein bowl above from the dollar section of Target. Frankenstein's monster is great for an English party since the book was written by british author Mary Shelley. We placed a bag of Jelly Babies (an English candy) in the bowl. We had a mix of English candy and items for the party that I got at Jungle Jim's; a great store with food from all sorts of countries.

I used the "double, double" quote from William Shakespeare's play Macbeth for the punch bowl. I found the printable online.

We tried to use the Subway station signs (printed out from online) as our food labels. The wording didn't show up well on camera, but it looked cute in person. This is "Dr. Frankenstein's Laboratory" where I laid out my copy of Frankenstein and two test bottles of Halloween candy. Nobody opened these, but they were cute as decorations.

I had to do something Harry Potter themed. The label for these was found online, as well as the recipe. It's simply a pretzel, a rolo, and a pecan. Yum!

I saw these knife cupcake toppers at Michael's and just had to use them for Jack the Ripper! The cupcakes are topped with some red icing too for blood. I placed a few out on Bram Stoker's Dracula to show off- the blood works for that too!

I had these purple Halloween shot glasses from a previous year and we used them to allow people to try the soda above, which I also got in the Great Britain section of Jungle Jim's.

This is just a shot of the chips and salsa we had out for snacks! We placed the little plates in the back as decoration instead of actually using them.

The musical Sweeney Todd has a character named Mrs. Lovett (played by Helena Bonham Carter in the film) and she makes these "meat pies" made up of people Sweeney has killed. Lovely, I know. Anyway, I made these "fruit pies" instead and called them Mrs. Lovett's fruit pies with some toppers of Carter holding one of her pies in the film.

Sorry for the sideways shot, but I wanted to show the drinks. I used Halloween-themed drink labels for the orange cups. I got them in the Target clearance aisle as well, I believe. I taped the sign "Keep Calm and Have a Cuppa" to the table and provided some fun black and white paper straws.

That's about it for the food and decorations! While some of these things are Halloween-esque, they are also British, so hopefully you can find some fun things to do for whatever theme you're going with.

Games:

We had a few games. One was called "Queue and Eh" which was basically a Question and Answer with British-themed questions. A couple of the questions I used:


True or False: William Shakespeare had a son named Hamlet - FALSE, his name was Hamnet

Sweeney Todd works on what street in England? - Fleet Streeet

We also had a game called Word Choice and people had to write down as many words as they could make from Baskervilles (the Arthur Conan Doyle book). Some examples are bask, vile, silk, silver, etc.

I also printed out five golden tickets online for Willy Wonka and hid them throughout the house. Whoever found them first won a bag of Willy Wonka candy.

My friend who was the Queen also brought a fun game where people broke into teams and all but one member had to pick something "english themed" from a bowl and using only one word each, they had to try and get the rest of the lone member to guess what it was. They got a certain amount of time to guess as many items as they could. It was a bit difficult to use one word after awhile, so it soon just turned into "say what you can to get them to guess it." It brought people together and seemed to be enjoyed by most.

Finally, we had a costume contest where people voted for Best Girl and Best Guy. The winners got a bag of some fun goodies. For example, the guy got Dracula themed solid cologne, etc.

Prizes:

I had the Willy Wonka candy for the golden ticket game.

I had other english-themed prizes too, like books written by British authors, British candy from Jungle Jim's, British potato chips from Jungle Jim's, a zombified Sherlock Holmes coaster, etc.

And that's it! Again, I'm sorry I'm just NOW posting about Halloween, but I hope to have my last three parties up ASAP and then I will try and be more consistent with posting here. Please pin, facebook, tweet, leave comments (I will visit your blog in return), etc.


I link up at http://www.somedaycrafts.blogspot.com/, http://www.raegunramblings.com/, and http://tatertotsandjello.com/