For Halloween in 2016 the decorations were inspired by Tim Burton’s oeuvre and as a special surprise for my colleagues I organised a small version of a hot chocolate bar.
I spray painted several differently sized glass bottles black, stained labels for 2 brown glass bottles with tea and burned the edges of one of them. Using 1 and a half A2 sheets of black carton, some baking paper, a few red faceted self-adhesive crystals and glue I made a lantern for the table with LED lights, 2 coffins for sweets and 8 bat silhouettes as wall decorations. I re-used 2 picture frames from the Mad Hatter Teaparty, painted them black and added a picture from Frankenweenie and a picture from Corpse Bride as “freaky family portraits”. From the shop Tiger I got 2 small plastic pumpkins and painted one partially black and spray painted the other one completely black. They came together on the table with a real pumpkin weighing 2.5 kg.
Inspired by Beetlejuice and a picture of an artificial flower with an eyeball I saw on Pinterest, I glued “eyeballs” into a small bouquet of fabric flowers. These ones really freaked people out! As I couldn’t find any glass marbles or plastic eyeballs, I used some chocolate eyeballs, the remaining ones filled one of the paper coffins together with some sour filled jelly eyeballs from Trolli (sold at Lidl). I personally found those creepier than the flowers with eyes!
For the hot chocolate area I recycled a small bar blackboard, repainted it with blackboard paint, wrote on it with white chalk and paired it with some spiderwebs and a paper pumpkin. The bunting was comprised of 17 different Burton inspired pictures. The music consisted of soundtracks from Tim Burton movies as well as a few classic Halloween songs like the Monster Mash, I Put a Spell on You, Werewolves of London, Ghostbusters and Thriller.
The food made everything come together! I have wanted to make vegan almond dough witches’ fingers since I first found them on Andrea’s blog Chocolate And Beyond roughly 2.5 years ago. As my colleague wanted to make similar ones filled with sausages we decided to have those instead as we were only 2 vegetarians in the office that day but still had a large veggie choice available despite that. The sausage fingers were very popular together with the Guacamole which was presented in a hollowed out pumpkin prepared by the same person. My puff pastry, herbs and cheese bats as well as the deviled eggs with black olive spiders were popular contenders. We also had ghoulish cupcakes, some finger snacks which we decorated with the cupcake toppers and 2 monstrously good (bought) cakes.
For the next work event I planned a Neverland Charity Lunch Sale which one of my colleagues asked me to do as her going away party (she loves Peter Pan!) since she was returning to Spain and to raise funds for a charity she has been working with.
Jess Creates Events 