2019 – YLE’s 11th annual Halloween client celebration. This year, we put the Castle Facade from the Wizard of Oz party back up on the house and rather than it being the Wicked Witch’s castle, we turned it into Dr. Frankenstein’s Castle & Lab. My Mom and my brother’s fiance built lots of lab props including a raised lab table for Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. We also had a lightning machine going behind Frankenstein’s monster you can see in this video.
The idea was to have as many experiment and lab areas as possible. We put the Bride of Frankenstein on the dininroom table and made it look like she was hooked up to all the electricity and created a board with a handle that the kids could pull down and it would make all sort of electrical sounds. We had flashing lights so it really felt like you were lighting her up to come alive! On the other side of the room from the Bride was another lab area where we lit up the glass cabinets with blue lights, covered the glass with frosted plastic and pasted printed xrays.
The livingroom area was meant to be another dark and creepy place where the doctor had notes and experiments posted and pasted everywhere. We burned the edges of all the pasted notes above the fireplace to make it look like one of his experiments had caught on fire.
On the front porch, we had a standing Frankenstein’s monster to greet people and a table lab set-up with lots of old skeleton pages from medical text books, we had a medical text book, lab beakers and an old microscope and more xray pictures.
Next to the table we had another experiment that had a vintage phone in a box hooked up to a cell phone that played scenes from the various Frankenstein movies (kind of like when you go to Disneyland and pick up the birthday phone to hear a birthday wish from the characters).
Beyond the experiments, we built two bars to look like labs where we put the themed signature cocktails – two on one bar, and one with a water dispenser on the other bar.
The drinks we made were:
- Frankenstein’s Monster:
- splash of blue raspberry mix (Finest Call)
- 2.63 liters lemonade
- 1 bottle vodka
- 2 bottle pineapple rum
- 2 bottle melon liqueur
- 3-4 cups water
- juice of fresh oranges (to taste)
- remember this was for about 100 people, hence the punch size measurements
- The Bride of Frankenstein:
- 2 packages lemon lime powdered Kool-Aid (this was not easy to find and I may have substituted with Gatorade)
- 2 cups sugar
- 46 oz. pineapple juice
- 1 quart cold water
- 2 liter bottle of ginger ale
- 2 bottle of champagne
- Whiskey Blueberry Ginger Punch (how boring right? At this point, we decided to not make signs for the drinks and just told people they were all experiments and they would have to just try them):
- 1 – 750 ml bottle of bourbon whiskey
- 1 large bottle of lemonade
- IKEA blueberry syrum to taste (mix with club soda 1:4) 16 oz. syrup to 64 oz. club soda
- 2 liters club soda
- Ginger Beer to taste
- **water** – always important to add water to your drinks
And, we set up a kiddie pool on a table covered the table and the pool with black fabric and creepy cloth, filled the pool with ice, decorated it with chains and put a cauldron in the center – this is where the guests who brought their own could put their drinks and where we put sparkling water and sodas.
The front yard had several seating areas and the dance floor was set up down the long driveway. Next to one open air seating area was the lab where the monster was on the experimental lab table. Another seating area was under a canopy that we draped in red satin fabric (leftover from the Victorial Vampire Wedding Ball), and set up Victorian furniture next to the Horse Drawn Carriage that was used to hold food.
The back was a mellow space for kids to play with giant games like Connect4, Jenga, Cornhole and darts. Not pictured is the infamous dancefloor that we kept pretty much the same as previous years with an arch of lights overhead and castle walls on the side.
I think pictures are worth all my words, so I should just jump in and start showing the rest to you:) Here is a gallery of the fun and even more experiments that were created.
lifevents
