Medieval madness

A couple weekends ago, we celebrated the birthday of one of our friends (who, by the way, happens to share the exact same birth date as Allan-- only 12 years apart) at his in-laws' house. It was a medieval-themed party, so people dressed as knights and wizards and jesters and serfs and princesses. There were medieval-themed activities aplenty.

I decided to dress as a bubonic-plague-carrying rat. I created mouse ears out of a headband, cereal box cardboard, acrylic paint, and pink felt:



And then dressed in all black clothes (i.e. the BLACK Death), painted my nails black, and donned a sign with the scientific name of the pathogen that actually caused the bubonic plague: Y. pestis:



Allan's costume was a little less elaborate, but funny just the same. Since his name IS Knight, all he had to do was wear a nametag-- and voila! A real live Knight! ;-) Creating his shield, however, took a little more work. I copied the family crest that adorns the keychain and fridge magnet I brought back from my trip to the UK a few years ago. Basically cut a crest out of white printer paper, added a red square out of giftwrap, and then hand-drew and cut out the spur out of an index card, which I painted yellow with Todd's watercolors. A foam sword from K-Mart completed the ensemble:



Here is the Knight himself, dressed in his suit jacket, to convey his "suit of armor". He's wearing the nametag from his 20th HS reunion last year, complete with a picture of his 18-year-old self ;-)



There was Welsh beer:



And good food (that's actually the cake):



There was also archery (first time I ever got to handle a bow and arrow!), jousting (where I made a valiant attempt to kick Allan's butt-- funny, none of the other wives were interested in sparring with their husbands), and a marshmallow catapult contest, where half the objective was NOT slipping on all the hay! The birthday boy got to try to slay the dragon pinata with a wooden sword, and I had fun going around spreading germs by blowing bubbles.

Rather than make this post eternally long, I'll stop posting pics here and go upload the ones featuring me and Allan, onto Facebook. Check there for more pics of the aforementioned activities.

EDIT: Uploaded, tagged, and captioned the pics on Facebook. Some of it's a bit silly :-) Check it out:

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2349868&id=3605072

The full set of party pics, in far better quality photography, can be found here:

http://digimattphotography.smugmug.com/gallery/7755773_tMDCk