Lord of the Rings Birthday Party

Spencer just turned nine years old and we threw him a Lord of the Rings party. He does archery, so a lot of the inspiration came from Legolas and the other elves who use bows.

Here's the invitation:

I decorated the kitchen with some "trees", a birthday banner, and quotes from the books.

On the table is a basket with gold plastic utensils wrapped in brown napkins. I held the napkins around the utensils with little gold rubber bands from my kids' Rainbow Loom stash.  I saw that trick at a graduation party and thought it was genius.  It's so easy to find a color to match your party and they are just the right size!

The trees are pool noodles that I covered with brown paper lunch sacks.  You cut the bottom off the lunch sack and slide it over the pool noodle and scrunch it down.  Then you add another sack over-lapping the first, on up the tree.  Then I stuck some faux greenery that I had into the hole on the top of the pool noodle.  To make the trees stand up, I threaded the pool noodles over some old speaker stands we had.  But the speaker stands weren't tall enough so I had to use fishing line to attach the tops of the trees to the curtain rod as well.

The banner says "Happy Birthday Spencer" and I made it using my Cricut keeping with the gold, browns, and greens.

 The other wall held a collage of movie pictures with famous quotes.  I found all of the images (including the Middle Earth map) online and I looked up the quotes in the books. Accuracy is important to us nerds.

In the living room, I removed the curtains from the curtain rods and added two Lord of the Rings banners - one from Rohan and one from Gondor.

For these, I raided my fabric stash and dusted off my sewing machine.  I finished the raw edges of the green and black banners and made the rod pockets at the tops.  For the designs, I free-hand drew them on the white fabric with a pencil and cut them out.  I hand-sewed on all the pieces for the horse head.  But then I decided that took too long and I just glued the tree pieces on the Gondor banner.  Also for the tree, I only drew one half of the tree, folded the white fabric in half the long way, and then cut out both sides of the tree so it would be symmetric.  Just like how we all used to make hearts out of pink construction paper in elementary school.  I plan to hang these banners in Spencer's room after the party.

Outside, where all the activities took place, I made a Mount Doom on the shed using plastic table cloths.  They used that for some of the games they played.  Here's the birthday boy tossing the ring into the fires of Mount Doom.

 I made him the elven cloak out of some old curtains. (How very Sound of Music.) And ordered the leaf brooch from Amazon.  I'm sure my boys will use it for many Halloweens to come.

Now on to the party activities!
I had a station set up where they could make The One Ring To Rule Them All out of oven-bake clay.

My  husband led several ring tossing-type games.  This one, they were trying to get the hula hoops around the cones.

I can't tell you the exact rules of the games, because he just makes this stuff up as he goes based on what the boys are interested in.  Mad skillz, that one.

Then we armed them with cheap dollar store bows and arrows and let them run around playing Elves vs. Orcs.  They took this very seriously.

Time for food!  I served regular food and tried to give it a Lord of the Rings-ish name.  The coolers that held the drinks got fancy signs, though.

Then it was time for birthday cupcakes!  Chocolate cupcakes with fire frosting!

Here's how to make the fire colored frosting.  Mix up some red, orange, and yellow buttercream icing.  Splat the three colors of icing onto a sheet of plastic wrap like in the picture below.  Roll up the plastic wrap into a tube.  Insert the tube into a large leaf decorating tip (I used 1M).  Then insert that into a decorating bag.  Pipe the swirls onto the cupcakes.  It's kind of tedious, but it looks really cool when you're done.

After opening gifts, we sent everyone off with a Lord of the Rings themed treat bag.  They got One Ring (Pop) To Rule Them All, some Swedish Fish (raw and wiggling just how Gollum likes them), and a glow stick from Lady Galadriel.  They also got to bring home the rings they made and one of the bow & arrow sets.

Whew!  That was an epic party!  Good thing his birthday is in the summer when there isn't much else going on.  Happy birthday, Spencer!

Sheep Cupcakes for Skylander Party

One of the funny parts of the Skylanders video game is the sheep.  They get in your way and you can squash them or torch them or whatever you feel like.  So for Aaron's Skylander-themed birthday, I thought it would be cute to make sheep cupcakes for the family.

 

 

They came together quite quickly.  Here's what you need: white (or yellow) cupcakes, white buttercream frosting, and chocolate cake balls.  I had some chocolate cupcakes leftover from something in my freezer, so I mashed up 4 of them with some chocolate canned frosting to make the cake balls that would become the sheep heads.  (1 chocolate cupcake made 3 heads.) Then I made a dozen white cupcakes from my favorite box mix. (We're gluten-free here so I used Betty Crocker's gluten free yellow cake mix.)  I use the buttercream frosting recipe from Wilton.

 

Step 1: Load the frosting in a piping bag with a #7 tip and pipe small dots around the rim of the cupcake.

Step 2:  Form the cake ball into an oblong shape and stick it on top the cupcake.

Step 3:  Pipe some more small dots around the head to help it stay in place.

Step 4:  Finish piping dots to fill in the rest of the sheep.  Then pipe two dots on the head for eyes.

(I tried to buy the frosting eyes from Michaels, but they were all out.)

 

Here's the birthday boy with a sheep cupcake!

 

To view my post on Skylander Elements cookies and party decorations, click here.

To see my post on Skylander Portal of Power cake plus party games & activities, click here.

 

Strawberry Lemonade Party

We had a little Strawberry-Lemonade birthday celebration for my mom-in-law at our house last night.  I made this banner in honor of the occasion.

The banner was made with layered shapes cut from the Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge from Close To My Heart.  I cut out circle tags on white cardstock, flower tags on yellow cardstock (resembles a lemon slice) and letters on pink cardstock.  To assemble, I threaded yellow ribbon through the white circle tags to form the structure. Then I glued a yellow "lemon slice" on each circle.  I sponged pink ink on the edges of the pink letters and attached them with foam dimensional tape.

It looked a little plain, so I added the pink tissue paper flowers and the yellow crepe paper streamers.  Tissue poms are cheap and easy and quick to make.  My kind of craft!

Tissue Paper Flowers:
Started with 20" x 20" pink tissue paper.
Stack 5 sheets.
Accordion fold into 1 long strip
Cut folded  paper into two halves
Round the edges with scissors
Staple each in the middle
Carefully separate the layers of paper
Fluff
Tape to wall

(If you want to make a full sphere, I'd suggest starting with 10 sheets of tissue instead of 5, so it would be nice and full.  Also, you'll want to add the hanging string at the same time you add the staples -- BEFORE you fluff.)


Because it was a Strawberry Lemonade party, all the food had lemon or strawberries in it.  I made little labels for the food on my computer (font = Minya Nouvelle) and printed them out on white cardstock.

Life has handed us a few "lemons" lately, and it was refreshing to pause and celebrate some sweetness.

Pickle Cupcakes

We celebrated my father-in-law's birthday at the same time as my nephew's.  My nephew had requested a special cake (see yesterday's post) so it just felt right to make a special cake for my father-in-law, too.

Problem was, I had no idea what to put on his cake that would make it "his".  So I asked my kids, "What does your papa like that I could put on his cake?"  They answered "pickles".  Ummmm...

But then one day I was thinking about how my father-in-law always says, "It's no big deal."  It's one of his most favorite phrases.  I put that phrase together with the pickle idea and got "No big dill."

And thus was born the pickle cupcakes.

To get that 2-toned frosting look, you draw stripes of gel food coloring with a toothpick inside your decorating bag before filling the bag with frosting.  I drew 4 vertical green stripes and then used white frosting.  (You have to use the gel food coloring - not the liquid.)  I added green sprinkles to mimic the seeds that float around in pickle jars.  The candy on top is a green sour apple flavored candy straw that was somewhat pickle shaped.

I made one larger cupcake pick that says "Another birthday? It's no big dill" and then little pickle cupcake picks in case someone missed the pickle reference.

Happy birthday to my father-in-law!  And many more!

My Husband's Angry Bird-day Party

My husband is one of those math and science-type guys so he understands things like "trajectory".  Which is probably why he enjoys the Angry Birds game.  My boys love it, too, so I decided that Brad's birthday should have an Angry Birds theme.

The boys jumped on board with the idea and, one day when they had a half-day of school, we spent the afternoon crafting our own Angry Birds as well as some Angry Bird Launchers!

We started out trying to make our own pom poms out of yarn but the boys got easily frustrated with wrapping the yarn around the circle template.  So I pulled out my bag of ready-made pom poms, and turned them loose with craft supplies and glue.  Googly eyes, of course, make everything more fun.  Then the kids used pipe cleaners to make bird beaks and pig ears and snouts.

The launchers were inspired by this blog post that has been popping up on Pinterest a lot lately.  I used yogurt containers instead of plastic cups.

Here are my boys during the party launching the pom pom birds at the pig fortress.  I think they might have enjoyed this just as much as playing the iPad game!

I had fun making decorations, too.  My friend told me about those bird faces and I simply cut them out and taped them on some balloons and on the birthday present. (You can download the balloon templates here.) The banner says "Happy Angry Bird Day" and that was made with my Cricut.

Since there were only 6 of us, I didn't want to make a whole cake.  So we had cupcakes! I feel the red bird's pain: I also have to deal with a unibrow.  I bet that's why he's so angry.

 Happy birthday, Brad.  I hoped to make this party as cool as you are! xoxo

Pokemon Birthday Party

My oldest son just turned 9 and he is currently obsessed with collecting and trading Pokemon cards.  So I put a few Pokemon details into his birthday party.

First of all, here are the cookies he took to school for a class treat.

First, I drew the black line and little circle in the middle with outline icing.  Then I outlined the red and white half circles, then flooded everything.  I was planning to go back over the black lines again, but I forgot.  By the time I remembered, I had the icing tip all cleaned and the icing bag thrown out.  Oh well.  If I were to make these again, I'd probably do the red and white half circles first and add the black on top later after the red and white icing was dry.  My poor child has a December birthday, so he usually doesn't get my best work, and I didn't have the luxury of waiting for the icing to dry! In fact, I made these in such a hurry, you can see air bubbles in the frosting.  The kids probably didn't notice.


For the birthday party, I made cupcakes in the same basic design.

I used my little star tip (#16) to make the red and white portions of the cupcakes.  Then I used the same tip to make the black line and little circle on the top.

To fit the Pokemon theme even more, I made little cupcake picks to stick in each cupcake.  The Pokemon character images came from this site.  Scroll down to the Bingo card section.  I printed one of their customized Pokemon Bingo cards and used a paper puncher to cut the characters into little circles.  I used a slightly larger circle cutter to make the black circles out of cardstock.  I taped a toothpick to each black cardstock circle, then glued a Pokemon character to each side of the circle (covering up the toothpick tape).

Some family members couldn't make it to the party so I packaged up a couple of cupcakes for them.  I saw this genius idea on one of the blogs I read, but I can't remember which one.  If I could remember I'd give them credit!  Anyway, you simply put the cupcake into a small, clear, plastic cup then slide the cup into a clear cellophane bag.  The cupcake doesn't get messed up in transport!  (I might get messed up as you try to carefully drop it into the plastic cup, though!)

Another thing I made for the birthday boy was a birthday banner.  Times like these, I'm very thankful I have a Cricut.  You can churn out a snappy looking banner in no time.  The letters and number are from the Cuttin' Up cartridge.  The black circles are from the Art Philosophy cartridge available from Close To My Heart.

The Pokemon balls on the banner I made myself in Photoshop Elements.  Blogger wouldn't let me upload the .pdf file I had with four balls on one sheet all ready to print out.  So here's a .jpg of just the one ball.  You can copy and paste it into Word as many times as it'll fit, I suppose.

Click on the image above to open it full-size in a new window.  Right click on the image and select "copy image".  Open your word processing software and paste the image in a new document. Resize if you want, then copy and paste it as many more times as you need.