Ancient Egypt Halloween party
Published by Manning on November 8th, 2017
My Halloween party theme for 2017 was ancient Egypt! This is one I’ve been wanting to do for about 20 years! The theme is so rich with built-in imagery, colors, mythology, monsters, etc; it was insanely fun to explore. Here are some of the projects and costumes that went into our ancient Egypt Halloween party…
I started off by sending out our annual animated invitation; I make these every year, and my friend Robbie Davis always supplies music, and in this case, lots of cool sound effects.
Now, some of the decorations we made…
Of course we had mummies! We used a couple old skeleton props and turned them into these DIY mummy props.
One project that was really important in transforming our apartment into an Egyptian tomb was creating these hieroglyphic wall decorations, using stencils and lots of sheets of craft foam.
This was my favorite project for the whole ancient Egypt party: a 6-foot foam board and paper maché Egyptian sarcophagus; the perfect selfie booth!
Our whole front hallway was turned into a booby-trapped tomb entrance. We hung this spiked ceiling to give people a sense of being squished on their way in!
I made the cracked ankh for the door out of foam board with a layer of craft foam shapes all cut out and glued together and spray painted gold. The bricks in the hallway were just sheets of tan craft foam.
We also made these paper maché pickaxe and shovel props as decorations for the tomb entrance, and we displayed them with a few lanterns.
We made half a dozen of these paper maché scarab beetle props and displayed them out throughout the apartment, and outside on our terrace.
These paper maché canopic jars were part of a mummification scene in the bathtub that we didn’t have time to completely finish, but they looked cool on their own!
Other decoration projects included: several dozen little plastic scorpions taped to the stairwell walls, leading people to our front door; lots of old green liquor bottles with tiny battery-powered lights suspended in them to make really neat lanterns, lots of plastic snakes and bugs and bats, flickering orange and yellow lighting everywhere (set up using our Hue lights), a couple of those battery-powered torches with fabric flames, and lots of other stuff I’m forgetting right now!
Now, some info about our costumes…
I made this big ol’ paper maché Anubis mask with red lights in the eyes and a door in the neck that I could open in order to talk/drink.
For my fiancée, I made this Cleopatra headdress and collar as well as a pair of gold bracers and a belt, all from foam board and paper maché! I need to add some pics of her actually wearing the stuff.
You can check out our previous year’s themes, invitations, decorating projects, costumes, etc, in my Halloween party theme archive.
About Manning Krull
How to make a 4-foot paper maché alligator
My violin skull mask, Mardi Gras 2015
Three-headed paper maché dragon sculpture
November 14th, 2017 at 11:36 am
love this. i kept meaning to reach out and see how things went and this did not disappointed. love the spiked foyer maybe the most…well done! (unsurprising, ‘egypt’ has always been on my theme wishlist but i couldn’t conceptualize the details…y’all did great!)
November 15th, 2017 at 12:23 am
Thanks Rhienna!! Ancient Egypt has been on my list since waaaaay back in my Philly/South Jersey days! I’d propose the theme to our party committee every year and they never went for it! It felt cathartic to finally get it out of my system.
August 1st, 2022 at 2:13 am
Any chance you’d be willing to sell any of this stuff?:)
Chris