Posts Tagged ‘Murder Mystery’

Christmas Ornaments

by Scott

This is a bit of a belated Christmas post about our new 2010 ornaments. Tina and I have started a family tradition of making new ornaments each year to hang on the Christmas tree. I hope that some day we’ll be able to decorate the tree and each ornament will be connected to a special memory. This will be our third year to do the tradition and each year we have used a different material.

2008: Our first year making ornaments we made ceramic ornaments at the local ceramic store. They made everything very easy. They had a wide selection of un-decorated “bisque” ceramics in all shapes and sizes ready to be painted. Once you paint them with a chalky glaze paint they’ll need to be fired in an oven. The local ceramic store had everything we needed: we picked out the ornament shapes out and painted them right there. A few days later we picked them up after they had been fired in an oven. They turned out great; see the gallery below.

2009: The following year we choose to go with simple wood ornaments. They sell various shapes at the local craft stores and along with a set of paint pens we were ready. These were the easiest to make so far, and I’d expect them to last the longest.

2010: This year we wanted to do stained glass, but we don’t know anything about glass making. Instead of real stained glass we used painted glass that when it dries it has a stain glass look. We picked up some plain clear glass ball ornaments at the store along with a paint kit. The kit had several colors along with a bottle of liquid leading which is a thick black paint that when dries resembles the lead joints seen in stain glass windows.

To make the painted glass ornaments we had to do a two-step process. The first day we used a China Marker to draw an outline on the glass. Next , we used the liquid leading to draw a beaded line along the outline. The liquid leading requires at least 8 hours to dry. So we left them to hang in the closet. The next day we came back and painted color in between the shapes created by the leading. To paint the color you just use a special tool that comes with the paint kit to scoop paint into the area. You fill up the entire area pushing the paint to cover all the areas. It requires more paint that you expect; it thins out as it dries translucent. The color paint requires another 8 hours to dry then they are ready to hang on the tree.

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Hollywood Murder Mystery

by Scott

This years Murder Mystery Event was a great success! We held it again this year downtown at Café Capri, they are very helpful in making the event easy to organize. For this year’s theme we choose “Hollywood Murder Mystery” filled with cheeky caricatures of famous celebrities such as Bill Rodgers still wearing his sweater from his famous children’s TV show, and country music super stars Willie Ray Cyrus and Shania Vain. A few fictional characters showed up such as Juan Valdez and V.R. Ewing! It was a great time to see our friends dressed up in costume trying to impersonate famous people.

This year’s event was much harder to solve than last years with only two detectives successfully solving the crime. These two were able to find the three important pieces of information: motive, opportunity, and the weapon. The put these together to prove that the character Nicole was playing was the murder. Nicole was able to throw off suspicion by claiming that the gun she had was just a tranquilizer gun used to quite animals before trips on airplanes. Kyle took home the ‘Best Sleuth’ award for his detective work.

Everyone from the Hollywood Murder Mystery posing in front of the cake at the end of the evening.

There were some really great costumes! Cody came dressed as Jack Cool a movie actor straight from the set of his new vampire movie. He won the ‘Best Costume’ award and was the butt of several Twilight themed jokes through out the night. In the honorable mention category Molly’s costume of the cleaning lady, Gladys Green, was spot on, along with Beth’s immersion into the rocker Cinnamon Stix’s attitude. In the ‘Best Actor’ category Chris Walters blew everyone away with his British accent for the character Lincoln Mercury.

I encourage everyone to check out the rest of the photos from the event on flickr.

Tina and I would like to thank Café Capri, Sandee Moss of Cinderella Stories for the awesome cake, Cody Green for both participating and taking awesome pictures, and everyone else who attended the event for making it a success. Thank you.