All and everything with Amy: blacklight

My eldest son asked for a UV/Glow in the dark party for his 12th birthday. Now for most people this would have been a major panic, not for me though. That's because 2years ago myself and a friend had planned to have one of these, sadly it didn'y happen as her husband was taken ill, but I did still have everything that we had bought in readiness for it - everything from paint to paper, straws to lights.

I had loads of ideas on a Pinterest board about UV and Glow in the dark. This was a great help and gave me lots of ideas. We hunted for an invite we liked but couldn't find one so we made our own, along with an instruction card -

instruction card


invite

These were printed out on paper, they would have been better had we been able to print in really bright colours, but never mind. Son's friends all thought they looked good.

As soon as son said this is what he wanted for his birthday we set about how we could decorate the house (yes we were hosting it at home!) Well as loom bands were a big thing and they had a few that were glow in the dark I thought I would try them under the UV blacklight, they worked. So when I next went to town I bought a handful of glow in the dark and UV reactive loom bands, I also contacted a friend that had them in her shop and she sent me loads (I paid her for them). And we set about making chains and adding neon triangles to some of them.

We also had a play about with the UV face paints that we had to see what effects we could get. They were pretty good and I did gets loads of comments from friends on facebook.

Big thick lines and patterns didn't look as good as thinner ones, and as with the star above the colours do mix and blend into each other.

We painted a sheet with neon paint and I was really pleased with how that looked, and we painted white canvas's as they were spare (i'll explain further down).

Next to the canvas is a giant glow stick and a pringles tube painted black and then painted patterns with the neon paint. Also pictured above is the shot glass sphere that is only half as I never finished it. The shot glasses were the neon ones from £1 shop all glued together (see below).

We also had glow sticks made into balls, and glowsticks scattered all about the house to glow.

As far as I am aware that is all of the decorations sorted and included on here.

For the party bags I bought clear celophane bags (son asked why no fancy party bags) and as I explained to him, being clear the UV light would work with what was going in them. They had sherbert straws (£1 shop for 48), they had a glow in dark tattoo, a yellow stretchy man (glows under uv light), a bag of tic-tacs and nerds (mixed in clear bag) and a rubber stretchy ball thing. All of which glowed under the light.

Lastly was the canvas - I bought an A3 blank canvas and had some UV and neon pens. The idea was that everyone wrote the birthday boy a message in the pens and they would glow under the UV lights. Everyone did write messages and it looked great under the lights. These were a pack of 3 with 2 smaller ones that we just painted.

We started off the party with the normal lights on and no UV blacklights or disco lights on. Once everyone had arrived and had got facepaints if they wanted it, neon moustaches, glow loombands and glow sticks and glow necklaces we turned on the disco lights only and main lights off, then me and hubby turned on all the UV black lights and all you could hear was "WOW" and "OMG i'm glowing" and "This is wicked" from son's friends. My mission was complete and a success!!!

I had a few games organised which we did, I can't post photos of them as they have otehr peoples children in. But the first we did was "Pass the camera". Think along the lines of pass the parcel, except when the music stopped they were meant to take a photo of themselves (camera was set to party without flash). Well they were taking them of each other. We have heads cut off, part heads, part of my lounge etc, but all have made for good keep sakes for son.

We also played pass the parcel, in which there was forefits written on neon stars so they showed up under the UV lights. Then we played the "Glow stick toss" game. I had made a game board from a white shower curtain, cut shapes out and edged them with tape and then glow in dark tape so they could be seen and fixed it to my washing line pole and a pole across, I taped carrier bags to the back to catch the glow sticks. (see below). Each shape gave the person a differnt amount of points if the glow stick landed in it. They had 10 glowsticks each.

Lastly I had 4 coloured glass bottles that had a glow stick inside, using the glow sticks from the glow toss game I made them into circles and they had a game of glow stick hoopla.

Prizes for games included glow axes (25p in the works sale), flashing glow necklaces (59p each from home bargains) and a tub of glow sticks (69p from home bargains). For food we had normal party food as I couldn't be doing with trying to find foods that glow, and some that I found online as meant to didn't. His cake was also meant to glow as the icing was made with neon food colours but sadly it wasn't brilliant, so I stuck glow sticks in it!