DIY Themed Party

Halloween is upon us. Having a theme party, but everything costs too much? There are many ways to have a themed party for a decent price.

A few years ago, three friends and I were planning a themed party and we had a limited budget, so we decided we would make most of our decorations and even costumes too. Here are a few steps to help you make decorations for your themed party.

1. First, you need to pick your theme. This may sound like a no-brainer, but you want to make sure that you have ideas of how to work with this theme. If you can't come up with any ideas of how you want to play this theme out, it will be very difficult. If you cannot come up with how you want to carry out your theme, look for movies or books that might help you create a visual. My friends and I knew we were going to have this party months and months in advance, so we spent some time brainstorming and threw out a few ideas before deciding. We really liked the idea of a pirate theme, but we just needed to make sure we had a way to carry out the them. So, we figured there was nothing better than to watch the movie, Pirates of the Caribbean, which filled us with ideas of how to carry out our theme.

2. Once you have your theme picked, you might want to narrow down what exactly you want to focus on. This way it won't be a jumbled mess, and it will have a definite them. Plus, it will be easier to make the decorations. When we were planning our party we knew we had three areas we wanted to decorate, so we wanted to narrow down exactly what we wanted too; Either decorate it all the same, or have each part focus on a different aspect of the them. We decided the first area would be the pirate ship, so for that area we focused only on things that would deal with the pirate ship. The next area was the deserted island, and the last was the cave filled with treasure. So, we knew exactly what we wanted to do.

3. If you aren't very creative, talk to someone who is, or even search the Internet for help on ideas. This way you might get a little help on how to do certain decorations at home without buying some decorations. For the cave, we knew we wanted to cover the walls to look like rocks for the inside of the cave. We were not sure how to do this, so we went to talk to an art teacher at one of the local schools. She gave us a bunch of different ways how to make the rocks. So, we decided to test out a few of the ideas until we figured out what we liked best.

4. Check what you have at home. You might be able to find a few things that could work out perfectly for your theme or you might have something that with a little doctoring up could work nicely with your theme. I had a chest at home that was the perfect size for a treasure chest. My friend had a lamp that we turned into a palm tree - it was one of those multi-headed floor lamps, and one of my friends just took some brown cloth and wrapped it around the pole and then used green streamers and wrapped them around each of the arms of the lamp and left some of the streamers hanging to look like leaves. Most of our costumes were things we had at home too, like an old t-shirt that we ripped a little to give it ragged edges, and old pants that we cut off. For our name places for everyone, we took so white paper soaked it in tea and burned the edges to give it an old look.

5. Check out yard sales. You can find things that work perfectly with your theme for great prices. We found a lot of our decorations and props at yard sales. We spent one Saturday morning going around town to all different yard sales. We found a bunch of faux jewelry for cheap for our treasure chest. We came across a kids toy pirate ship and pirate hate they we bought for less than $3. We found a toy telescope for 10 cents. We found many great things for great prices.

6. Check out discount stores - especially party stores. You can find great party favors, costume pieces and even decorations. We bought some accessories for our costumes like a pirate hat and some eye patches. We found a good deal on chocolate coins for party favors and for inside our treasure chest. We found a few decorations there too, like a skull, goblets, and some of that faux spider web stuff to give our "cave" more of a spooky look.

7. Check out craft stores. You can get some great deals at craft stores; there is usually some sort of sale going on our weekly coupons. We bought a bunch of brown package paper and acrylic paint at a craft store so we could paint murals for the different areas of our party. We also bought felt and wooden dowels to make pirate flags as party favors.

8. Refreshments! Can't forget refreshments. Snack foods work really well. You might find some food that goes with the theme. If you are doing and ocean or underwater theme you could use fish crackers or those gummy candies in shapes like sharks and fish. You could make some blue punch to go with it for water. For our pirate theme we just had snacks like chocolate coins, and we bought round sandwich cookies to look like treasure coins. And of course, they don't need to be any specific brands, sometimes store brands are cheaper.

9. Music. Music is always good to set the mood. You can just use music you already have, or even legally download a few tunes from the Internet that go with your theme - it's not too expensive. You could even borrow some music from a friend too. We borrowed the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack from my sister, and it worked really well. It really set the mood for our party.

10. Have fun! It is definitely really important to have fun while you are decorating, making, and preparing for your party. It makes it all worthwhile. It is very cool and rewarding to see the decorations you made, the work you did, and having people compliment on it.