What a hoot!

Our very first staff 'Night at the Museum' event went spectacularly well last night.  There was charades (the exhibition team had to act out 'Kelvin Day'!), bottle fishing, clue solving, texting, poem writing and playdoh modelling.  Photographic evidence of the fun everyone had and the exceptional sculpting talents of our staff is below.

But before we get to that, a HUGE thank you to Charlotte Stace and Linley Wellington for the time and effort they put into creating and supervising the awesome scavenger hunts.  Thanks also to Alice Franklin and Sue Page for their incredible origami and crocheted owls, which were much coveted prizes awarded for the best playdoh objects.  Lastly, thanks to the Social Angels for organising the drinks and snacks ... and inviting Ruru to be involved in the event!

So ... each of the three scavenger hunts started with acting out a famous Taranakian.  Here's Karen confounding Janie with her free-and-easy arm movements:

Jenny, Simon's daughter, takes the Exhibitions team in hand:

The CSO's were pretty liberal with the rules on the bottle fishing!  What kind of technique is THAT Walt??

In contrast, "The Winos" were much more orderly and proper:

One activity required the teams to write a poem inspired by objects in Taranaki Naturally and Harry Devine's poem about 'ratty little bats'.  Here's the CSO team (CSO stands for 'Charismatic, Sociable, Optimistic'!) writing their rhyming masterpiece:

Interlude - here's two of our favourite poems written on the night (though we did also like the CSO team's reference to Kelvin!).

From the Exhibitions team (but written by 7 year old Jenny ... a magnificent effort!):

A moa is a bird,

It's tall as a wall.

The shark is wacky grey,

And it chomps on its prey!

And from the team known as "The Individuals":

Oh hark a shark!

Oh crikey it has a jandal!

A surfer's been man-handled,

Shark's shiny teeth a-glow,

The surfer had to go!

Not sure if this is Duncan showing Jenny how it's done or the other way around:

"The Individuals" were the first team back and thus the first team to start modelling butter coloured playdoh into collection objects (or other sources of inspiration):

Though it may appear that Kelvin was Karen's muse, she was actually modelling Banks' silhouette on the 'Shadowing Venus' signage.  Kelvin refused to mould any playdoh, claiming he got so much hassle about his percussion drill bit last time that it wasn't worth it!

Some of the first playdoh offerings - an elephant from Hannah; a mailbox from Polly; Karen's Banks silhouette; Stephanie's shark; Kerri's Ferdie the bull and Dale's buzzy bee:

Clare recounted a beautiful story about how the object that inspired her playdoh offering reminded her of her father.  It got her quite emotional ... such is the power of museum objects:

Members of the Exhibitions team stroll back with their playdoh goodies:

The Exhibitions team's offerings - Simon's fungus (I guessed what it was before he told me!); Jenny's Ferdie the bull; Geoff's buzzy bee and Gerard's vacuum cleaner.

All the offerings laid out ...

The winning playdoh model - Adrienne's amazing surfboard, complete with leg rope and ankle strap!  Adi claimed Alice's gorgeous origami owl with this effort:

More winners ... Kerri's Ferdie and Stephanie's Meg won crocheted owls:

Duncan tried to pull a swifty on us by making Orinoco the Womble to claim a prize, but we knew he'd had prior practice at making wombles from playdoh!  We gave him chocolate anyway ...

Polly's postbox and Simon's fungus won prizes too:

And Sue might be a busy woman for a while ... her owls have attracted a lot of attention and requests from people for their own owl.  I hope you have lots of audio books you want to listen to Sue!

We should probably also mention that - after a late suggestion they should have been given a time penalty - the Exhibitions team got the most points and thus claimed Niles.  Janie, you just have to liberate Niles from the closet and hand him over ... though we're not sure Exhibitions are the most responsible parents for an innocent garden gnome! 

Congratulations Exhibitions and THANK YOU to all the staff who came along.  You're awesome!