Our Hunger Games: Catching Fire Party

With the success of our Hunger Games Party last year, we couldn't resist doing a follow-up event when Catching Fire came out =D We featured some different activities, had a ton of people come down, and had a grand-old time. For those keeping score, many of my ideas came from the pins on my Pinterest Board, Hunger Games Party!!

Find Your Hunger Games Name

We wouldn't be able to start our event without knowing who we were, so we figured out what our "Hunger Games" names would be. We used one of those templates where you take pieces of your own name, throw in some funny sounding words, and wind up with a unique nomenclature. I'm Senpetra M. Standoak if you're wondering, and we used this picture from CatchMyParty as our template.

District Emblems

After we had our names we chose our district emblems. Bouncing by Michael's I found some small wooden discs we used as a back, printed out these district emblems, and then mod podged them together. Our finishing touch was self-adhesive clasps (that I also found at Michael's). This activity was inspired by g*rated.

Sustenance

Our tributes wouldn't have lasted long without some sustenance, so we had a crackers, cheese, and fruit spread,  served Arizona Iced Tea (because its delicious and seemed like a modern way to survive when you need energy lol), and also decorated Camouflage Cookies (granted, Peeta does more camouflaging in the first book, but the Morphlings do it in the second book, so I figured we were still legit).

DIY Bow and Arrows 

Once our introductions were out of the way, it was time for weapons training. One of our teen
members does some Live-Action Roll Playing (LARPing) in Spokane, WA, and he wanted to demonstrate the safety bow and arrows they use during combat. After his demonstration, we gave tributes a chance to make their own.

Inspired by this blog post from Sophie's World, we wound up using CPVC pipe I purchased at Lowe's for the bows themselves, and used bamboo stakes as the arrows. I was planning on using the bamboo for the bows, but they were too brittle. If you're going to do this activity, I would suggest using some of the elements from this Instructables (like cutting notches in the pipe to hold the string better).

The Arena

Finally, we actually had our tributes turn their skill and wiles against each other. Now don't panic too much. We didn't actually fight each other. We modified a game of Assassin to give it a more Hunger Games feel. We had everyone write a number on a piece of paper, and then they wore that number on a name tag. Every tribute drew a number that someone else wrote down, and that was the target they were tying to eliminate. As soon as they eliminated their target, they moved onto the tribute their target was targeting.

Instead of using Nerf weapons, we had everyone wear a construction paper bracelet secured with a single piece of tape. You eliminated your target by removing their bracelet (without touching any part of your target besides their bracelet, which leveled the playing field nicely). In keeping with the Hunger Games, after several eliminations we changed the rules so you could target anyone, not just the number you were assigned.

Mockingjay

I'm wondering what kind of fun we can have for the Mockingjay Pt. 1 debut...hhmmmm...

Awesome Monster Bookmarks

I'm really thankful for awesome coworkers who find awesome ideas, and for awesome people who share their awesome ideas online =D

Miss Lauren does a monthly Open Crafts event, and in her searchings for the perfect craft, she stumbled across Monster Bookmarks. As you can tell from the picture, their awesomeness goes without saying (and Miss Lauren's awesomeness for finding them goes without saying as well).

Tally's Treasury is a DIY and crafting idea blog that gets updated every Thursday with new projects. Just bouncing around I found some awesome things to make (like a ping pong eyeball headband, and DIY Glasses and Moustache Disguise) , and she has instructions and a template for the Monster Bookmarks available on the blog as well. 

An awesome (how many more times can I use that word in this post) thing about this activity is that it is really simple to do, and lets the kids create something that makes it easier to read. Have a great time while promoting literacy? Yes, please!

In addition to promoting literacy, the kids that came for this activity were inspired to create their own bookmark designs as well. They might have been simple, but the kids really enjoyed having the freedom to create something from scratch.

Zombie Prom!

On a Saturday night after the library closed, a rare strain morphed teenaged patrons into brain-eating, make-up put oning, Thriller dancing zombies!

As everyone knows, zombies eat brains because they don't have any of their own, and a delicious way to do this is Jell-O. I took some foil, creased and folded it into a brain looking shape, and put it into a muffin tin. Just add some Jiggler recipe style Jell-O, and you're set.

Adding some red food coloring to pink lemonade makes a tasty blood juice, and dipping pretzel rods into melted chocolate with some almond bark at the ends make for some edible fingers =D

After some munching it was time to zombify ourselves! There were five effects we went for: whited-out faces, dark eyes, rotting flesh, messed-up hair, and blood.

If you buy some Ivory colored foundation and some dark eye shadow, you get some deathly looking skin with sunken eyes. For girls, tease your hair out, and for guys, mess it up!


You can do rotting flesh two different ways. Mix about equal parts of flour and corn syrup into a sticky paste, put it on your skin, and then press some toilet paper onto it. This becomes a "skin" you can tear, and also looks like rotting skin.

Another way to get the rotting skin look is to mix up flour, corn syrup, corn starch, and water, and apply it to your skin. Mix in the different ingredients until it starts to clump onto your skin. Start with your corn starch and if it's too runny, add some flour, or if it's too sticky, add some corn syrup.

Once you have all this "make-up" applied, add a generous amount of blood. You can mix corn syrup and flour (about two parts corn syrup to one part flour) with one drop blue food coloring and a lot of red food coloring to make a smearing, purplish blood, or use tomato paste for a clumping, red blood.

It wouldn't be much of a prom without dancing, and we thought Michael Jackson's "Thriller" would be appropriate. There is a whole series of YouTube videos that breaks down the dance step by step, and we used that to acquaint everyone with some zombie moves =D

This program was way too much fun and works well with the Summer Reading theme "Own the Night" and the upcoming Teen Read Week theme "It Came From the Library."

Pinterest: Your Interests in a Picture Social Network

So, something that has come across my radar recently is Pinterest, and I have to say that I am a fan.

Pinterest is a new social media fad that was originally popular with crafters and do-it-yourselfers. This social network allows you to create a "board" and then "pin" pictures to it. Your board could be "Books Worth Reading" (my first board of pins lol) and each one would be filled with pictures with a short description underneath them.

The thing that makes this different than other social networks is the focus on pictures instead of text. It also cites the web page that you got the picture from automatically.

If you have interests that would look cool in a picture format, or you just want to browse what others have set up, take a look at Pinterest.