Oh No! Ikea has even more stuff I don't need

but immediately and desperately have to buy.

Look, people, at this link.

What's even worse is how close I live to IKEA. Which means I can go whenever I want, all the time, several times a day if I choose. 

And it's raining and frigid today (again) and I'm low on endorphins and I have to sew a commissioned work for a magazine (other people's, not mine) and I'd rather indulge in retail therapy because I've already maxed out my swimming quota for the week. And it's not even the weekend yet and the children have (uncharacteristically) confirmed their 2014 Halloween costumes and they involve lots of sheer fabrics  ("but must be stretchy and cannot be itchy, Mom!") and upholstery fabrics that we hope don't look like those beat-up apricot/pink/green floral sofas with "Free!" signs on them, sitting out in people's yards and I have no sewing mojo and those same children had the audacity to grow lankier over the summer so that their winter jackets and fall coats mysteriously now have only three-quarter sleeves and look suspiciously cropped at the midriff and I have to go to Target to buy new coats because they need them because it's raining and frigid.  

This, my friends, is what a vicious cycle looks like in Stay-At-Home-Mom-Land.

It is not one of my better days. See? No photos. Only whining.

Do you have days like this? When the weather defeats you? And you want to take a gigantic flamethrower to the sky to vaporize all the clouds to give the sun the ghost of a chance to peek out and resurrect your languid soul? And did I tell you that two days ago, I was viciously assaulted by not one, but two caterpillars while cleaning vegetables for lunch? 

Wait! No. I must not give up. I must look on the bright side. It isn't snowing. The internet is working. The cars aren't dinged to death by hailstorms. The post office hasn't raised its international shipping costs again. There are no solicitors at my door asking if they can give me a free roof estimate. We do not have a mice infestation (only bloody caterpillars). Nobody has released new scientific evidence that Nutella causes the plague. There are no lice in my children's hair. 

And IKEA has launched its Paper Shop.

I suppose I could shout for joy. 

Or just go shopping. Sewing (and ecstatic utterances) can wait. 

Mystery Party: Clues & Evidence

Today's post is all about the clues and evidence which, if you remember, were the main point of the party, at least according to Jenna.

We laid out 3 clues:

1 Footprints (or, more accurately, shoeprints)

These were just drawn and photocopied on different colored paper, with each color representing a different shoeprint.

This made it easy to just say, "Make sure you get one of each color!" when they were strewn  over the crime scene floor 

and there were 10 + kids rushing about trying to gather them all up.

The kids had to determine if any of the suspects' prints were among the ones they found, either with their dossiers 

or the facts poster. The prints were sufficiently distinct that the pattern of the sole would distinguish them. However, for the die-hard investigators among us, we also included a measuring tape in the Detection Kits so they could measure the prints. The size of the shoe (e.g. 9) was the length of the print in inches (in this case 9"). 

2 Fingerprints

Jenna wanted them all over the walls and floor and objects and everything, so that people could "dust for them with talcum powder". Whoa. Thrilling, but not really practical.

I took her concept and kid-friendly-fied it as follows:

• Took a circle of cardstock.
• Made a thumbprint on it.
• Covered it with contact paper.
• Painted over it with silver acrylic paint.

To "dust for fingerprints", we simply scratched off the silver layer to reveal the fingerprint underneath.

Then I made them in different colors, with each color representing a different suspect's prints. Like the color-coded shoeprints, this sorta defeats the purpose of an objective fingerprint investigation, but it much easier to tell the kids, "Collect one circle of each color!" And to compensate for the loss of suspense, we left out one suspect's prints and the kids had to figure out which one was absent from the crime scene. 

2 Handwriting and Ink Pigment Analysis

Again, another of Jenna's ideas. She once saw an episode of Fetch in which the contestants did this to solve a crime and she wanted this included in her party. 

So I gathered some of the black markers in our house, and found four

whose ink compositions were significantly distinct,

and used them to prepare four separate ink samples on coffee filter papers (no reason other than we had lots of them at home). These were the reference samples 

to which the kids could compare the chromatogram of the ink on the note found at the crime scene.

There was also an invisible message between the lines. However, it wasn't an actual clue to the mystery, and we'll explain that in the final post.

Mystery Party: Documents & Dossiers

The suspects in a mysterious crime, Jenna maintains, are very important.

Long before the party even saw the light of day, Jenna and I worked out the plot. Which meant establishing the crime and determining the motives and culpability (or innocence) of each of the suspects. Which meant having suspects in the first place. And, by association, profiles of those suspects. With alibis. And clues and other evidence to either incriminate or exonerate them. Anyone who's played Clue knows this.

The challenge was not so much world-building as creating a kid-friendly way to sift through all the data and stuff and reach a verdict. During a party. Within a time limit. I'll show you what we did, and then disclose how well our plan worked with the kids who played our game, in a later post.

This post is about the various printed documents we made to give substance to the plot. 

1 Document Folders

We made one for each guest. We bought open manilla folders, printed out and stuck on labels 

and taped up the sides.

The kids wrote their names on them and decorated them with the same stickers as with the detection kits.

Inside each folder, we put

dossiers of the suspects,

a suspect chart to help the kids organize their investigation

and a map of the surrounding area (i.e. the neighborhood block).

2 The Verdict Envelopes
We made two sets- one for each team.
Each set contained one envelope for each of the suspects.

Three of the suspects were innocent; their envelopes contained Try Again notes.

The fourth envelope contained a letter, written by the culprit, explaining what happened,

and included coded instructions on how to find the missing cars,

along with a photograph of the hiding place of the cars - a neighbor's house - cut into pieces.

Up next: Clues and Evidence.

Updated May 2017 to add: Many people have written to ask if I have made/will make these documents available as a printout for sale and I am happy to say yes! You can find them in this post.

Mystery Party: Detection Kits

I'll come right out and answer the #1 question I suspect everyone has: where we got these little suitcases. They were from Target. They were on clearance, way back in April, and they were $2.48 each. I bought them right away, simply because they were so absolutely perfect for... anything. And at that price, it would've been a crime not to have bought them.

Now, way back then, Jenna had already been talking about her party, and her idea that it should involve solving mysteries with clues.  So even while I was loading these suitcases into my shopping cart, I was almost certain we'd use them for detection kits. And yes, they are as sturdy and as beautifully made as they look. 

Let me show you what we filled them with.

Detection aids,

specifically, a paper measuring tape for measuring footprints (from Ikea); a little notebook (dollar store bulk pack); a book of secret codes that we printed and folded; a ball-point pen (dollar store bulk pack;, a UV pen and a real magnifying glass (dollar store or Walmart).

Here is that book of secret codes. Emily and I compiled some of the more well-known codes - Pig Pen, Substitution, Morse, Cipher Wheel - onto letter-size sheets, and folded them into 8-page books. We love this method of making booklets! You'll see it again at Emily's Science Party later. 

The UV pens are from here. 

The kids loved them because they were like magic. You write (invisibly) with the nibs, and then reveal the writing with the light in the cap. It works even after the ink's been dried on the paper for days. 

I put the girls to work, filling the suitcases, assembly-line style.

Everything had to be QC-ed first, of course.

We also made stickers to decorate the kits on the day itself. We printed them out on colored printer paper

and used our sticker maker to make them adhesive.

On the day itself, we set out the kits and baskets of markers and stickers 

so the kids could personalize their own.