When I told the Madhouse girlies that we'd been chosen to host a Harumika party, they were over the moon.
And that was even before the box arrived with all the goodies inside !
The girls took over sending out the invitations. As the party was to take place in the first week of the holidays, I was expecting a lot of their friends to be unavailable so I told them that they could invite five friends each, expecting only a handful to say that they could come. So it was a bit of a shock when they pretty much all said that they'd love to come !
We laid all the goodies out on the table.
Sophie and Juliette loved looking through the beautiful fabrics and accessories that came in the box. I give them free reign on my patchwork box (as I no longer have time to do any sewing now that the blogging has taken over, they might as well use it - I used to create things like this, rather than entertaining you lot !!) but I don't have anything as pretty as these materials, so they were totally wowed.
Each guest received a leaflet showing you the basic Harumika techniques.
But it's actually so simple that nobody needed to use them. You just wrap the material around the mannequin then use the handy Harumika tool to push it into the slit at the back which holds it in place.
Each party guest received a little bag with three pieces of material, a couple of belts and lots of sparkly stickers, as well as two mannequins, a pink one and a white one. There was also a dinky little miniature one for the party bags.
Unfortunately, this is where I hit a technical hitch in terms of blogging. One of the parents mentioned that she didn't want pictures of her children appearing online, and some of the other girls heard and - being shy image-conscious teens and pre-teens - they all declared that thay didn't want their pictures online either. This led on to an interesting discussion about cyber-bullying and how they are scared of getting nasty comments on facebook if they have pictures of themselves on there. Quite a few of them had already blocked "friends" on facebook for this very reason. Sophie herself has been a victim of this in the past, so I can't say I was particularly surprised, but I was sad to learn just how common it is. Anyway, that's why in this blogpost, you won't see any of the party guests apart from my own three Madhouse Mini-testers !
I hadn't asked Pierre to invite any of his friends because I didn't think a 4-year-old boy would be the slightest bit interested in playing with Harumika. How wrong was I?!
He actually managed really well and his designs were just as good as those made by the 8 or 11 year old girls !
Given that everyone had identical items to use, I was amazed at the wide variety of designs created. We had a bit of a fashion show to show them all off !
The girls carefully stood them all up on the table ...
Then we inadvertently discovered a new game : Harumika dominoes ! One fell over and knocked all the others down !
Juliette has discovered a real passion for Harumika and has since spent hours sorting through my patchwork box cutting out squares of fabric to use ! It's a really simple activity and is a great way of encouraging creativity with no mess - there's no glueing or cutting needed so it could even be packed away in a bag and used to keep the kids entertained on a long journey. I might have to try that out on our 8-hour drive down to the grandparents' in Brittany later in the month.
Disclosure : We received a pack of goodies from Harumika in order to host a Harumika party.
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How cool! I've never heard of these before. It wish they had been around when I was a little girl. Juliette might have the spark of a future fashion designer now. :)
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