My Little Pony and Spider Man Birthday

We do combined birthdays a lot since the kids birthdays are only 2 days apart and I usually go big with 20+ kids for 4 hours and I make everything myself and we have a meal as well as cake and icecream. Or we have just a few kids but I make everyone their own costume. (no joke, did that for my daughters fairy birthday party, need to blog about that one too someday)  But this year we decided to go a little smaller, less kids, less time and buy a lot of stuff rather than make it all. It felt really weird (especially when everyone left after only 2 hours) but it worked out ok. Life's been a little crazy and there just wasn't the time or energy to go super epic big. The important thing though is the kids had fun and enjoyed it. I have to admit that yes, some of the really super big epic parties can turn into something that's more for me than the kids. True there's the high bar of the pinterest world but for me parties are just one of my things, I did big ones before I found pinterest and even before I had kids, even back when I was a teenager.

The themes this year were My Little Pony and Spiderman. The main thing my son wanted was a Spiderman pinata, both of them like My Little Pony so it was a great fit all around. I bought a My Little Pony tablecloth, birthday banner, gift bags and plates. We also bought Spiderman plates and gift bags. I did make a few things including two cakes and a Pin the Tail on the Pinkie Pie game.

 

For the cake I mad a rainbow/tiedye interior following the method on this site (I've done this a couple of times now and it always turns out so cool but I did learn my lesson, since we live at a higher altitude and have to add extra flour and water to the cake mix, it makes too much batter so that's how we got the small cake that I put on the top) and for the outside decoration I followed this great tutorial for a Rainbow Sprinkle Cake

Pin the Tail on the Pinkie Pie!

I had this awesome idea, do pin the tail, but use a bunch of tails from other ponies instead of her own tail. The trick was we had more kids coming than the basic characters so I started looking up a few others and I got a bit carried away and did something like 25 tails, but it was fun finding them and the kids LOVED it! They loved figuring out who the tails belonged to, some are obscure characters that I really liked the look of their tail and there are a few that are designed by fans and aren't in the show at all but looked really cool. The kids each picked a tail they liked and we played with the blindfold and then they had fun just putting one tail on at a time to see what it looked like. I uploaded a PDF on my deviantART account that you can download for free

 

 

 While waiting for their turn to pin a tail on the other kids colored My Little Pony pictures.

 For the pinata it worked really well to have the kids sit on the stairs so they were out of the way but could still see.

 

  

 Then it was cake and icecream time! Yep, let's blindfold and spin the kids around for not one but two games and then stuff them full of sugar. Best Party Ever! ;)

 

 

 

 

 

 We had all the kid friends over on my daughters birthday and on my sons birthday 2 days later we had some family over so I made him a Spiderman cake. It was my first icecream cake and the first time I had ever made my own fondant. I made marshmallow fondant with these directions and it came out really well. The topper is a bank we bought at ToysRUs and I loved the way it worked out!

 

 

Turkey place cards/napkin rings

If you look up toilet paper turkey crafts there are a ton out there, but this one is a bit different and was fun and easy enough for my 4 year old to do so I thought I'd share. Plus, you can use them in two different ways! :)

Turkey Place cards

Turkey Napkin rings

The items you will need are:
toilet paper tubes
black and orange marker
googley eyes
feathers
glue
cardstock for name cards

With the black marker, draw three peaks with the middle one being a bit skinnier. If the toilet paper tube were cut along the back and laid flat the peaks would look like this:

Here's how it looks on the toilet paper tube:

Cut on the lines. It's easiest to cut down instead of trying to cut down and up.

 Here's how it looks all cut:

Now you will fold the peaks down. I drew horizontal lines on this one to show you where to fold:

 The middle peak gets folded twice to make the turkey head. Kids can fold them down but they might need a bit of help. It can help if you bend the wings so they fit around the tube shape but this can give it a different look.

 Now you get to do all the fun decorating stuff! Color the beak orange, glue on the eyes and glue on some feathers.

Don't I look so cute?

 Then you make a little name card and it can fit between the head and the wings or you can slip the napkins inside for a cute napkin ring.

 We made a whole bunch of them and it was a lot of fun!

 Have a great Thanksgiving!

4th of July Hand and Footprint Tshirt

 The 4th of July is coming up and here's a fun thing we did last year -

Hand and footprint Flag Tshirts! 

Since I hadn't started my blog but I had started in my Pinterest addiction, I simply uploaded this picture and a lot of people have liked it so I figured I'd post about how we did it.

It was 4th of July morning and I suddenly wanted to do a bunch of fun stuff (yep that's me) so I looked up fun stuff on the internet and saw a few ideas I liked, one of which was a flag made out of handprints and footprints but I thought it would be fun on a Tshirt. So I dug through our drawers and found a white shirt for each of us and ran to the store and found some Tulip Puffy Paint since it was the only fabric paint that had red and blue left at the store. (There are a lot of varieties of fabric paint out there and Tulip even has a "soft" line that's supposed to be best for shirts but these shirts are still bright and doing fine after a year, the paint hasn't rubbed off, washed off, or faded!) We squirted a bunch of paint on a paper plate, put our hands and feet in it and put it on the shirts. Pretty simple, and a lot of fun - basically the hardest thing was making sure the kids didn't get paint on anything else! ;)

 For the kids shirts I did just their hand prints, but for mine I did my hand print and each of their hand prints :)

For my shirt I didn't want to get paint on my feet so I used the kids feet - it really surprised me how big the kids feet were!

 

 That's his footprint! I couldn't believe that it filled up so much space on the tshirt - I'm sure he's going to be super tall when he grows up!

 I love his expression in this photo ;)

 My friend did my daughters hair - fun star with ribbons!

We made two large shirts and gave one to my mom and then we were all off to the freedom festival. It was fun matching each other and like I said above, after a year the paint is still as good as it was that day, and it was a quick fun thing to do as a family.

Hope you have a great 4th this year!