Frugal Party

This week me and my sisters have been busy with planning our Eid party. One of the themes that comes up often on this blog is that of frugal living and finding ways of using less, wasting less, re-using and spending less. We managed to get things together for the party whilst keeping costs fairly low and I thought I would share some of the ways we did this:

• We managed to reduce the workload and food costs by splitting four ways. We will all be cooking one or two dishes and Kooky Little Sister and Long-Suffering Sister put up the decorations whilst Fashionista Sister and I fixed up the party bags, LSS will also be sorting out the music (nasheeds of course). I still had to do all the cleaning though.
• For shopping, Fash will do drinks, Kooks has bought sweets, LSS has picked up some of the nicer items for prizes and gift bag fillers.
• All of the guests were invited to bring along a dish. Again this saves costs and means variety for the guests and surprises for us.
• The various £-shop’s that abound throughout East London have been invaluable for party bag fillers, sweets for the sweet bar (pink, purple and blue) and candles.
• I found that many shops party sections had party bag fillers, but that these were expensive. Cheaper were the toy section of places like Wilkinsons where you could often pick up cheap multipacks to split.
• I have been collecting things for the ladies party bags since summer – nice bits for next to nothing from boot fairs, clearance sales and also samples and freebies.
• Items for the ladies bags included cosmetics, toiletries, jewellery, soaps, tea-lights, party poppers, hair accessories, and craft bits.
• Items for the kids bags included toys (including McDonald’s toys), mini pencil sets, pens, balloons, erasers, small games, hair accessories, party poppers and sweets.
  We have been picking up items from boot-fairs and sales through the year to use for prizes for games.

The party is tomorrow and hopefully will be lots of halal fun insh’Allah.

We filled the party boxes and then left them open so that sweets left over from the sweet bar could be thrown in.