Halloween is one of my favorite holidays (costumes and a theme, what’s not to love?) so my husband and I throw an annual Halloween party. Pinterest is a key tool for me when planning the party each year, so I thought it’d be fun to show you how I use Pinterest to plan. It’s a great tool for planning any event, including weddings! You can find all sorts of wedding planning ideas on the Littlehammer Games Pinterest account.
Step 1: Choose a Theme
My first step is to pick a theme. I’ve always wanted to throw an “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” party and decided to run with it this year. I'll be dressing up as Charlie Brown in his ghost costume with all the holes in it and I can't wait!
If you don’t have a theme in mind, run a search for “Halloween party” on Pinterest and start pinning things that grab your attention. After you have a lot of things pinned, scroll through them and look for commonalities. Are you pinning spooky, creepy things or ideas with a little more campy fun? Do a bunch of your pins come from a particular movie, tv show, or book? Any of those could point you towards a theme. For our first annual party, I noticed that most things I pinned were orange, yellow, and white so I made candy corn the theme.
Another way to pick a theme is to consider what you want your costume to be. You could create a whole theme around that. My Wednesday Adams costume last year called for an Addams Family theme so I went for it.
Step 2: Brainstorm decorations
Once you have a theme, step 2 is to pick decor that fits the theme. Run a search in Pinterest for that theme. For example, I searched “Great Pumpkin party.” Be broad at this point and pin anything you like the looks of to a new board. If you really like something specific but the instructions are hard to follow (a tutorial on making candles appear to be dripping blood, for example), look at the “more like this” pins that appear below it. There may be similar tutorials with clearer instructions. You can also click the small icon in the corner of the pin (top right corner on desktop, bottom right corner on mobile) to run a visual search for similar items. If you aren’t having any luck, then try searching “DIY bloody candle” in this example. This should get you a bunch of other results and hopefully you’ll find better instructions.
Step 3: Pick food options
Once I have a bunch of decorating ideas, I like to work on the menu. Since I like to have everything on theme, even the food, I searched “Great Pumpkin party” again and this time focused on the food ideas. As with the decorations search, its helpful to pin multiple variations of an idea. One of the memorable moments from Its the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown comes when Linus jumps into a pile of leaves but forgot he was holding a sucker. I really wanted to find a menu option that references that scene. The first idea I found was pretty complicated, but I pinned it to keep in mind and kept searching for related ideas. I came across one that was much simpler to make and still looked great, so I'm going with that one.
Step 4: Putting it all together
After collecting all these ideas, I go back through the board to pick my favorites and piece them together. The reason I don’t pick anything right away as I’m searching is that it might not fit into the overall plan at the end. For example, I may have decided right away to set up bobbing for apples but then have every other idea take place in the scenes at the pumpkin patch. Bobbing for apples might not fit very well. By gathering a ton of ideas up front then piecing them together at the end, you can make sure they all work together.
Sometimes it makes sense to combine ideas. I came across a baked Brie pumpkin recipe that looked amazing, but I didn't love the recipe and wasn't sure how best to serve it. So I searched for more baked Brie recipes and found one for bite size pieces with Brie and cranberries that looks delicious. So I've decided to use the technique for making them pumpkin shaped from the first recipe combined with the cranberry recipe to make bite-sized pumpkin-shaped cranberry baked Brie.
At this point, I find it most helpful to create a new board with my final choices. For a bigger event like a wedding, separate boards for decor, food, etc can help. Since a Halloween party is smaller, 1 board works for me. When all your final choices are pinned, you can start making lists of the supplies you need for decorations and DIY projects as well as ingredients for the recipes you chose. Then its time to put your plan into effect and host your awesome party!