Breaking Dawn Party

Yesterday was our big library celebration of Meyers' new book! I am very happy to report that we had 17 teens show up and we had a fine time (pictures to come). We did not have a sign up ahead of time, so I am especially happy with the turnout. The main events were intended to be the costume contest, for vampire, prom or wedding finery and the Twilight series jeopardy game. In reality, only one girl came dressed up, so she won that prize, and only two people really wanted to play the trivia. Luckily, all the side activities were the hits.

Planning:

I have to admit that I spent a lot of time planning this.

We had:

• 3 dozen cupcakes with Twilight series cupcake picks that I made with pictures from the net, library tape and toothpicks
• frozen Hershey's kisses (Edward's cold kisses)
• "Bite-size" red licorice
• lemonade and water
• "Ask Alice" fortunes in a glass goldfish bowl, with paper quotes from Alice mixed in with colored feathers, with a sparkly sign to catch attention
• red lunch bag goodie bags filled with more kisses and licorice, buttons and stickers courtesy of the publisher's book release kit, and little writing pads left over from last year's summer reading
• voting with marbles for Team Edward or Team Jacob
• Dance card icebreaker (these went pretty much unused, unfortunately)
• word search
• Edward and Jacob on a stick: nearly life size paper heads of the actors playing these roles for photo ops

The most popular things were the craft tables, with magnet making supplies, and the prize raffles. For the magnets, I bought flat self adhesive magnet panels that could be cut into shapes, and gave the teens Meyer related color pictures, glitter, ribbon, blank paper in red black and white, and coloring mediums. This was a hit, and they made magnets of their names as well as Breaking Dawn stuff. We had 3 t shirts ( 2 B.D. and one Edward), 2 copies of Breaking Dawn, 1 of Eclipse, a tattoo and iron-on set, 2 promo CDs and a CD of Meyer's play list for the first three titles to raffle off.

What I learned from this party:

• Our meeting room does not require 6 rolls of crepe paper for decoration
• Side activities are important!
• Although I downloaded a Jeopardy Power Point and put the trivia into it, it was really unnecessary for this party. My coworker Floating Lush was good enough to make me a large Jeopardy style category chart to use instead, which was what we did, but even that was just the icing on the cake. I think that unless I'm doing an event billed as Jeopardy trivia, I'll just read off the questions from a regular word document. The teens didn't seem to care much about the presentation.
• The amount of cupcakes teens can eat can never be underestimated

So, things were swell, I was exhausted afterwards, and I want to thank Floating Lush and Carol has Her Nose in a Book for all their help!