DIY Carnival

I, along with helpers, decided to throw an activity at church that was family friendly and more geared toward your inner kid. We decided to do an indoor carnival. So, I'm including some tips of making your own carnival too! This could be indoor or outdoor. This was a while ago and the weather still wasn't as reliable as we wanted for something outdoor. Anyways, here we go!

These were our booths:

• Duck Pond -pick up a duck, if it has an "X" on the bottom you win a prize!

• Cupcake Walk-Number spaces 1-8. The contestants walk around the spaces while music plays. When the music stops hope your number is called from the mystery hat

 

• Can Toss-We used tennis balls against 6 stacked cans. Get them all down for a prize.

 

• Target Practice-Get a set amount of points in 3 throws for a prize.

• Kissing Booth-guess how many Hershey's Kisses are in the jar (we had 3 jars and differing amounts. Each jar had it's own separate guesses)
• Face Painting-we bought a simple pack at Wal-Mart. It didn't dry very quickly so I would do better research on that!

Here's some additional ideas for booths:

• Fortune Teller-fortune cookies or someone dressed up and has a fun imagination
• Go Fish-attach a string with a magnet at the end to a stick. "Go fishing" behind a curtain or in a baby pool with cut out fish with a paper clip attached so the magnet will stick. 3 tries for a fish!
• Ring Toss-rings and glass soda bottles or pegs, get the ring on the bottle and win
• Balloon Dartboard-Tap small balloons onto a board in a grid and pop with darts. Careful of pointy darts!
• Spin Wheel with a bunch of different prizes 

Food:

Now as for food. Since this was an indoor carnival, popcorn would be a bit too messy. We opted for other carnival food. In a crockpot we stacked hot dogs standing up and cooked them on HIGH for 1.5 hours and they were ready to serve! That's all it took. We fit 75 into a medium sized crockpot. We served with chips and had a potluck for desserts. So yummy and VERY successful way to do a lot of food at once. Although we opted to save money and not to this, certain companies rent out cotton candy machines for as low as $25 a day! I know some Uhauls offer rentals, just go see if your local one does!

Prizes:

• Our prizes were just candy but if you wanted to go all out here are some other ideas
• Restaurant Gift Cards
• Stuffed Animals
• Blow-up Toys (like guitars or saxophones)
• Bouncy Balls
• Temporary Tattoos
• Bubbles
• Nail Polish
• So much more! Just go to your Dollar Store, I'm sure they have tons of "prize" worthy stuff

All in all, we budgeted for about $150 and we got right around there. In addition to the supplies for each booth (rubber ducks, face paint, tarp, etc) and prizes we also bought table cloths, balloons, printed signs, and the food. We did this in our church's gym which supplied tables and chairs for free.

Oh yeah! I made a cool invitation too:

Download the font here! I promise it's safe and didn't give my computer some weird virus. This is for the carnival like font. And I found the picture of the tents online just looking up clip art.

Things to do with Zucchini

Last summer we decided to start a garden. We planted zucchini, jalapenos and watermelon. Our watermelon plant died pretty quickly but the other two thrived. We can talk about the jalapenos in another post because this post is solely dedicated to our zucchini plant. We weeded and watered as needed and by the end of the summer we harvested over 2 dozen zucchinis big to small. So anyone else ever been in the same boat of what on earth to do with all that zucchini?! Well, we definitely got creative.

Here's my list of things to do with zucchini:

Sliced thinly:
Saute them in olive oil and garlic salt
Ratatouille (I didn't attempt but I thought about it!)
Oven baked with butter, salt and pepper
Oven bake chips
Fried zucchini
Pasta noodle alternative (large cheese grater or they have a veggie noodle device)

Sliced not so thinly:
Fries! (these turned out pretty tasty. Just dip in an egg and then a flour/breadcrumb/Parmesan mix and bake!)
Raw with veggie dip
Grilled (brush with olive oil)
Stuffed zucchini

Pureed/Grated:
Bread
Muffins
Pancakes
Baby food
Fried patties (with cheese and onion and other Pinterest recipe stuff!)

AND you can freeze your grated zucchini! My freezer currently has 7 cups of frozen zucchini...

Hope these ideas help or inspire you! If you want any additional information on recipes or techniques just ask! I will be happy to make additional posts that are more descriptive.