Despicable Me Party

Aaaah, the relief.  Crazy October officially finished today with Elliot's 5th birthday party.  Yesterday we had the last of the school fetes (but I'll post on that later).

Elliot had a Despicable Me party this morning and for those of you who haven't seen either of the movies, do. They are fun and cute. They were animated in France which Ben says is why the movies are so good.. I think the soundtrack is wonderful, but I am a fan of Pharell Williams, so perhaps a little bias.

As with most parties these days there are resources galore available on the internet and I did my fair share of internet research for this party.  The highlight of my research efforts was my 'purple minion' pinata, idea borrowed from Tonya Staab.  It isn't nearly as good as hers but the kids loved it.  They especialy liked the hair and when that fell off there was a mad scramble for the kids to get it and pretend to be purple minions.

As usual the cake didn't live up to the vision in my mind,  but I surrounded it with smarties in a hope to hide the dodgyness.  I also quickly gave the kids jelly (yellow and blue for the good minions or blue and purple for the purple minion) which distracted them and the adults.

Party food was all displayed using minions.  My personal favourite was the cookie robot.

Of course we also played a few games - the best was the simple game of Boogie Robots inspired by this scene in the movie.   The kids (and me too) really got into this (really just  Musical Bumps - dancing and when the music stops you have to sit down). The kids showed some great boogie style.

Harry Potter Party - the wash up

Today we had a Harry Potter party for Oliver and 9 of his friends.  I've mentioned before the many amazing Harry Potter parties on the intranet.  This probably wasn't one of them, but here are a few good parts of the party.  By the time the party happened at 4pm storms had surrounded Canberra and the rain came and went, came and went. We did potions inside but luckily were able to go outside to play quidditch.
I did a lot of research on how on earth we were going to play muggle quidditch, without broomsticks and flying.  In the end I used ideas from all over the place to come up with what I think are very cool rules... though perhaps not that Harry Potter-ish.

We had 2 goals rather than 6

The main difference between my quidditch and the real quidditch is that the golden snitch is a person.  In order to determine who would be the golden snitch I hid (ferrero rocher) golden snitches in the garden with one that had 'S' all over it.  The person who found that one became the golden snitch and got to wear this fantastic gold bowler hat.  Their job was to avoid being caught and there were 'safe' areas they could run to.  I had a few other rules that I might post another time in more detail but the main thing was that there was also a person from each side who could throw water balloons at the opponents.  But only their legs, if they hit any other part of the body they were out for one minute.  It was 36 degrees so no one really complained about the water balloons!

I was going to make robes for everyone, but I didn't.  Instead everyone got to wear a house badge to identify what team they were on.  We changed positions regularly.  To be honest everyone just ran around and focussed too much on the water balloons, so that didn't really work so well.. but I still think it was a good set of rules.

After Quidditch we were going to do the pinata.  I had great plans for this dementor pinata.  The boys were going to have to do the patronus charm and shout 'Expecto Patronum' while they whacked the dementor.  I had made this pretty sturdy and was looking forward to 15 minutes of dementor whacking. Unfortunately the rain had weakened the pinata and by the time I returned with said 'whacking stick' one of the boys had already pulled the dementor down and the boys were like vultures scraping out it's insides for loot.  For a short moment, my happiness had been sucked from me, just like a real dementor!

All wasn't lost.. there was cake!  Originally I was going to do a golden snitch cake, but instead on walking into the cake shop to get the ball mould, Oliver saw a skull cake tin and declared that he wanted a 'dark mark' cake.  A glittering green skull with a snake protuding from it's mouth. I put a picture next to it for this photo just so I'd remember what I was trying to create. It's wrong isn't it! I suppose I'll be able to reuse this when he Oliver goes into his heavy metal phase!!!  Yep, it's pretty dodgy, but the boys liked it.  Gross!

 

And here are the contents of the party bag: A Honeydukes sampler.  Yep, sugar overload! The Standard Book of Spells I got from etsy. 

Harry Potter Party: pre party stress

Oliver is having a party next Saturday for his 7th birthday.  A Harry Potter party.  I feel a bit like I'm spinning my wheels with this party (and it is distracting me from my other works in progress!)  I'm trying to both make it fun, but not be over the top about it.  All Oliver wants, is to play quidditch with broom sticks.  Ben says just let the kids do their thing without any prescribed party activites.  No pressure.

There is so much Harry Potter party stuff on the web and some very over the top but cool parties.  One thing I saw which I love is where people have painted brick walls on fabric and then slit an entrance through it for the kids to enter the party through 'platform 9 3/4'.  I love this idea so bought some brick fabric on ebay the other day, only to find out that the bricks were tiny, like doll size tiny.  Not to be discouraged, I thought I'd paint some lo fi bricks onto fabric.  So today, I thought I'd make the 'brick wall'.  As we were driving around collecting supplies for the cake and different things (in a slightly stressed and erratic way) I said "Oliver Oliver, what do you think about the brick wall?"  To which he replied, "Nah, I don't want it.  Don't do it."  I replied, "But it will be so cool."  He continued to say that we didn't need it and he didn't want it until finally I listened.  Ok, so it would be really cool, but perhaps the kids can just come in through the side gate, not through a brickwall. On their broomsticks....

children parties and sponge painting

On Sunday, we have Elliot's 4th birthday Robot Party.  I love lo-fi craft and I love having a party for my boys.  It's a toss up who's more into the party - them or me.  Well obviously they are because they are thinking about all the presents, but I love it as well.  Well, I love the planning that is,  a few weeks out I'm all about the party and doing the invites. Come closer to the time, I get myself all worked up and stressed.  And I hate the cake. I have too much pride to actually outsource the making of it, so I stress and stress about it. Having said that I know I only have a couple of years when I can get away with lo-fi birthday parties before the boys become all 'OH MUUUUM!!!' on me, so I'm making the most of it.
One of my favourite lo fi crafty things for a kids party is sponge painting.
Last year Elliot had a dinosaur party and earlier this year Oliver had lego star wars party and I pulled out a bit of sponge painting for both of them ... and would you believe I have managed to squeeze out a bit of sponge work for the Robot party on Sunday.
My piece de resistance is the AT AT walker from Star Wars that we did for Oliver's party bags this year using cut up sponges.  I then revisited the sponges for a tshirt for a friend of Oliver's who was moving to New York.  I love this I think it is so cute.

For Elliot last year, we sponge painted both the invites and the bags for his dinosaur party based on an idea from this book.

So for the Robot party, I have sponge painted rectangles onto tshirts and the children can then draw robots using the painted on shapes.  I'll see how it goes and you might see pictures of this - if it is successful!
I'd really like to work out how to do freezer paper stenciling one day as it looks much neater. But for now I'm all about the sponge.