LEGO STAR WARS Party Ideas

Legos and Star Wars.  What else could a first grade boy want for his birthday??

I am totally living vicariously here, since I don't have little boys.  Legos are super cool.  Period.  Legos I get.  But I must admit, I have not understood little boys' fascination with Star Wars until I started looking online for party ideas.  I mean, Star Wars has a lot to offer kids.  Good vs Evil.  Other planets.  Awesome space age technology- complete with ridiculously powerful ships and droids.  I totally want a droid to follow me around.

LIGHT SABERS!!!!!  Enough said.

So, let's stick with light sabers for a sec.  In my opinion, no Star Wars party can be complete without light sabers.  This is a perfect favor idea, and it also doubles as entertainment during the party.  And look at these, made with pool noodles (which are probably on clearance right now!):

I got this pic from Aimee Austin Deisgns.  She has some great ideas one there.  She also sells the invites, so if invitation creations are not your thing, you should check her site out.

Speaking of invitations, I do like to make my own.  If I were going to make these, I would probably head to Hobby Lobby or Michael's and pick up some of this lego scrapbook paper.  I would use that for a mat around the actual invitation.  If you have Star Wars Lego pieces, I think it would be super fun to have your little one design a scene for you to snap a picture of and use for the border or the top of the invite.  I think this would be a great way to give your child ownership.  If that's too time consuming, you could just find an unlicensed photo online by searching "Star Wars Lego" images.  You can easily make this in MS Word.  Just paste the picture at the top.  If you want a starry background, similar to Aimee Austin's, you could print the invite onto black starry paper, but be sure to use white lettering.

**One benefit of giving yourself several weeks to work on the invitations, other than the obvious time management plus, is that you can wait for Hobby Lobby to put their scrapbook paper on half price- which seems to happen every few weeks.

On to the cake....I love serving cupcakes because you don't have to take time to cut the cake, no extra plates and forks are needed, and they are easy to make ahead of time and freeze.  You can also spread them out on a table to maximize their use as decor, similar to the penguin scene we did here:

I would probably ice the cupcakes in primary colors (preferably using natural dyes).  You could use Lego candies to top them and intersperse them on a table with Star Wars Lego figures to create a fun scene.  In the picture below, we used a white tablecloth with small boxes underneath in some spots to provide depth.  For Legos, I would probably use a red tablecloth or black.  If you don't have one, I would send an email to friends before buying one.

For favors, I like the light sabers mentioned above.  But if you also like to hand the kids something as they walk out the door, you could easily fill a baggie with a handful or two of bulk Lego pieces with a printed label that says, "May the Force Be With You.  Thanks for sharing Ryan's 7th birthday with him!"  If you decide to do a pinata, you could fill it with the bulk Lego pieces and some candy.

Entertainment for this party is simple enough.  I would use those bulk Lego pieces and put them on a building table.  You can throw your kid's Legos there, too, as they will all stay with you when the kids leave.  The light sabers above will also keep the kids having fun.

For decor, you could cover the walls of the party room with black bulletin board paper, similar to the graffiti wall I mentioned in a previous post.  If you have a disco ball, or can borrow one, and some strobe lights, you could make the room dark (the black paper with help with that) to lend itself to the inter-galactic world feel.  Glow in the dark stars would make this effect even cooler, and could be bought in bulk and used in favor bags or the pinata also.  A soundtrack would be great as background music for the party.  Again, I would think about borrowing the music from the library or a friend if possible.

Have I left anything out?  If you have any ideas for Star Wars Lego parties, please share them here!

Send a save the date for your Halloween shin dig!

Check out this cool site for FREE invitations and save the dates...think "evites on crack."  You can email them from the site, which is the fastest and greenest way, IMO.  Or, you can create your save the date and save it to your desktop to either print and mail or email from your email account.

Bear Hunt invites- for FREE

Made these invitations for Squeaker's bear hunt party on kodak gallery using their 50 free Mommy cards promotion.  The photo above shows the front.  The back has the party details:

Squeaker's Turning Four

But Wait!  There's More

We're going on a rowdy jaunt

Will we find a bear- or not?

Join us January 9th from 2-4pm 

RSVP to staceyamdur@myemail.com for directions to the hunt

I ordered 50 of them for free ($3.99 for shipping, but I was ordering prints anyway).  

What will I do with the extras??  Probably cover the writing on the back and use them to personalize party favors or for decor.  I might even use them to decorate thank you notes.

If you haven't gotten your free Mommy cards, read the details here.  You can use these for calling cards, invites, or even teacher gifts.  I also thought about making "Caught Being Good" cards to hand out to my girls as incentives for good behavior.  You could make some of those for your child's teacher also.  

There are tons of possibilities!  If you think of another use, post it here for us all to see.  

FREE invitation idea

Man, I love free stuff.  If you have a party coming up, you can head over to zazzle and take advantage of their free 100 business cards.  These are NOT your typical, not so cute, business cards:

Talk about some fun invitations.  The possibilities are endless.  I think I might use these for Squeaker's Bearh Hunt party in January.

Check out Collin's post  to get the details and code for the free cards.  Then enter ZAZSHIPSFREE for free shipping too!!  Seriously, Collin is my hero.

If you wanted to spend a few bucks on these, you could buy a pack of 50 "Applied Magnets" Business Card Magnets with Adhesive backing, Set of 50 pieces for only 7 bucks from amazon and you have made magnet invites.  You can get 100 for $13.

Hmmm...I know a certain someone that might need to use these for save the dates...Of course, then she'd have to have chosen a date.  

FREE photo invitations through shutterfly!

Shutterfly is offering 12 free stationary cards through 8/22.  Use them to create special invitations for your upcoming party!

If you don't like their options, you can always create your invitation and save it as a jpeg to upload to shutterfly.

Have fun, and thanks Collin!

Make Your Own Invitations for a Pirate Treasure Hunt

We broke these invitations into small steps on the to do timeline, so that when the time came to actually make them, we knew exactly what to do and it went quickly and easily.  

Toward the beginning of this party's timeline, we brainstormed pirate invites.  Around this time, Sarita was planning a treasure hunt as a summer activity for the girls, so we talked about making the invites look like a treasure map.

The next invitation to do came a few weeks later, when we planned out the invite.  Again, I only spent around 15 minutes on this.  I simply googled pirate invitations, saved some images and invitation wording that I liked, and sketched out a mock up in my party planning book.

A few weeks later, we gathered our supplies.  As I mentioned in that post, I like to use supplies I already have and solicit the rest from friends and family in an effort to help them declutter.  I'm a great friend!

Finally, it was time to make the invitations.  I usually break the actual invitation making step into 2 to do steps/nights, not including addressing and delivering them (that's it's own step).  The first night I created the invite using word.  This didn't take long because I had already brainstormed and planned how I wanted these to look and what wording I might use.  

I did run into a glitch that some of you might benefit from knowing about.  When I went to print, I realized that my laptop was set to print remotely to the office, so I needed to print it from my husband's computer.  When I pulled the word document up on his laptop, the font had changed because he had an older version of word.  He didn't have a similar font I liked, so I was stuck.

But, luckily for me, I am invincible and quickly came up with the brilliant plan to save the invite as a pdf using acrobat reader on my computer and THEN email it to the other laptop.  This may be completely old news to you techies, but for me, it opened up a whole new world of possibilities!  For those of you who are even less techno geek than me, Acrobat Reader can be downloaded for free and is probably already on your computer if you open a lot of downloads you get.  Many of them are saved in AR, and now I know why!

Because of this glitch, the first session took about 30 minutes, instead of 15.  Luckily, my sister was there to help tear and stamp the edges with me to help the process along.  While we printed and tore, we also tried to tea stain the invites as we had originally planned.  This too turned out to be a disaster when the wording started to run all over the page, so we ditched that idea and used a brown stamp all over to create the same effect without the mess.

The next week, we sealed the invites with our wax seal.  I never found a K or an A seal, and didn't want to purchase one just for the invitations, so we used a bead to seal them.  It turned out fine, unless you have a scary imagination- in which case the seal may appear a bit like a bloody thumb print.

No- it's NOT a bloody thumb print

This is a messy process: keep down paper and be careful not to burn yourself!  We ended up using an older wax seal to hold the bead for us, so we could stop burning the tips of out fingers off each time.

So, this week I am addressing them, and next week I will deliver.  With these kinds of invitations, I will hand deliver most.  A few will go to friends and family out of town, so I will carefully stuff them into envelopes to mail.  This is why I usually give myself one week to address them, and one week to actually mail them.  This gives me 30 minutes total to hand deliver or get to the post office.

The whole invitation process was 6 steps.  By breaking it into steps over several weeks, things go more smoothly.  If I had tried to do all this in one day, I would have gotten frustrated by all the things that went wrong and given up or been unhappy with the final project.  

Do yourself a favor- plan your parties in 15 minutes.

Creative and FREE invitations that build the fun early on

You don't have to order fancy and expensive invitations to throw a WOW party.  These days email invites, especially for a casual party, are perfectly acceptable.  They are also easy, fast, free, and green!


When planning my invitations, I usually google the party theme for invitation wording ideas.  But this time, when googling "superhero invitation wording ideas," nothing fabulous appeared.  So my husband and I quickly worked with what we could remember about superheroes (the faster than a speeding bullet schtick) and had a blast coming up with the following wording.  It took less than 15 minutes and the result is super cute and fun:

What’s faster than a speeding bullet

More powerful than a locomotive

And able to leap tall buildings in a single bound?

Wait...scratch that and start again....

What’s faster than a keg stand

More powerful than the urge to down a beer when running (okay, walking) a 10k

And able to crawl from one pub to the next?

SUPER KARI

Please join us to celebrate Kari’s birthday

at BARC’s Annual 10K Pub Crawl**

Saturday, August 21st

10:30 am until we pass out

Let’s meet at Carlos’ Beer Garden at 10:30 to toast Kari before we begin our trek from bar to bar.

The theme this year is SUPERHEROES, so come dressed in your super best.

Bring your super men too!

For those unable to spend the day crawling with us,

please plan to meet us at the last bar, Sam’s Boat,

around 4:00 for an early dinner and cake.

Please RSVP to stacey so we know to look for you,

and in order to designate enough drivers for pick up.

**Aug 21 (Sat) The 10th Annual BARC PubCrawl; The theme has been decided for this year . . . “Superheroes”.  The start will be at 11 am at Carlos’s Beer Garden.  9 Bars, 7 miles, 97 degrees.  More info to come . . . please stay tuned . . .

 

Make Your Own Invitations: Step One- Gather Your Supplies

On my to do list this week, for Monkey's party,  is gathering invite supplies.  Planning in 15 minutes means breaking projects into short to do items.  So...this week, all I have to do is make sure I have everything I need to make treasure map invitations, modeled after the treasure map Sara made for the girls' recent hunt.

When making invitations, I have two goals.  First, I like to make my own.  I like them to be unique and like no others.  Second, I like to use materials I already have around the house.

For my treasure map invites, I need to gather the following:

• white paper
• tea bags (for antiquing the paper)
• thick and thin black sharpies
• lighter for burning the edges
• sealing wax
• A or K seal

I don't have a seal, but I'm pretty sure someone I know does.  Since I have plenty of time to gather (I give myself 2 weeks to make invites, and the seal is the last step), I have time to send out emails to see if anyone already has one I can borrow.  And I know my mom has sealing wax because she's totally into that stuff.

See the beauty of doing things early, and a little at a time.  If all goes well, and I am certain it will, I'll find a seal and my invites with be made with me having to buy a thing!  What's more earth friendly and economical than that?

Now, who has a K or A seal? ;)