Last Saturday, March 5, I worked with Fibbers on Ormond Quay to put together a New Orleans Style Voodoo Mardi Gras Party. The goal was to have some fun, and raise some money for Our Lady’s Children’s hospital (Crumlin) here in Dublin. For my friends in the US, they are essentially the equivalent of Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake, or Eggleston Children’s Hospital in Atlanta.

Jason, (Above center) the bar manager of Fibbers put together a great night – he organized the raffle, he got a fabulous band called T-bone, and printed off the poster and flyers for the event.

Meanwhile, I did the poster (top) out of a bunch of creative commons images and some of my own from Mardi Gras, made the No Sew Voodoo dolls, and created the bar decorations including a pair of huge poster sized theater masks in frames, decorations to hang from the ceiling (about 20 violet music notes on yellow and green curved backgrounds), and purchased a bunch of masks that were supposed to arrive in time to decorate and sell with the price of admission. It was a lot of work, but in the end, it was worth it – we raised about 500 Euros – despite the hiccups. (The 80 masks and about half the beads didn’t come in time for the party, so we wound up raising all of the money solely through the raffle. Also, not all of the decorations got hung up because there wasn’t enough time in between the underage gig and our fund-raising event.)

Most of the pictures are up here in my Mardi Gras set.

I do have some video of the band to upload if I can get my video media maker working again, but it’s a bit dark, so it may not work. Otherwise, by the time I got home and to bed (nearly 4am Sunday morning) I was completely wrecked. Apparently, so was my Mardi Gras dog.

Here’s hoping your Mardi Gras was as successful and fun as mine!