Super Mario Bros. birthday party! ..... aaaaand big NEWS! :)

Hi all! It has been such a crazy month, the play I'm directing is in less that a week and I am ready for it! I know blog posts have been short, sweet, and few-thanks for your patience. :)

I also got the HUGE and EXCITING news last week that one of my cards will be PUBLISHED in CardMaker magazine in Summer 2014!! I am so excited, I have been working towards this goal for a long time, what a huge thrill! :)

I have been dying to share these pics from Ev's 6th birthday a few weeks back! He wanted a super Mario Bros party and it turned out so cute! :) I am a weird mom who really loves doing the whole birthday party thing, it's a fun chance to be creative. I have done other parties in an Elmo theme, a Lego theme, a football theme, a Wii theme, and a Cars/Lightning McQueen theme! Plus countless others that were before I began blogging, haha. ;) Here's my now SIX year old birthday boy! :)

To start, here are the invitations, I found similar ones on Pinterest, and kind of messed around with my punches until I was happy with the mushroom design. The question block is a pocket that the invitation slides out of.

I mounted the mushrooms on a large black circle and printed these out from my computer. I added a plastic gold coin to the invitation for fun, since you try to get coins in the game.

 Onto the party bags! Went with the question block theme again, since it was so easy to cut the question marks out on my Cricut! ;) The handle is made from Mario themed duct tape we picked up at Michaels. We found Mario candies at Party City, also a few other goodies that Ev picked out.

I made a banner that went in his room after the party. The game uses many simple shapes like stars, mushrooms and bricks, all of which are easy to make from paper.

We made another GIANT question block, this time in the form of a punch piñata. In the video game, the characters punch the question blocks and sometimes they get coins from them. So we had the kids jump up and try and punch the pinata until the candy fell out. Pinatas at the store can be pricey, around 20$ or so, so I was glad to make this one out of a yellow tablecloth (plastic), and more question marks cut from the Cricut, plus an old box! The punching side is several layers of construction paper taped down so the first kid didn't punch all the way through on the first try.

The hats were 20 cents a piece at Michaels from the clearance bin. So we came up with as many different Mario Bros characters as we could think of, and then the kids were able to wear them and pretend to be different characters.

The cupcake idea was totally stolen from a friend. She had made her son these mushroom cupcakes (along with an adorable cake!) for his Mario party a few years back. I do not do cakes well AT ALL. I always tell people, you want something cute made from paper, I am your girl-from cake? NOT so much, haha! But the cupcakes were easy enough, and as per Steph's instructions I was able to use printer paper with the eyes drawn on. The cookies were accidentally happened upon at the awesome Eileen's Cookies in a neighboring town. Aren't they so cute? Delicious, too.

I found lots of wonderful Mario party printables FREE through the magic of Pinterest :) 

I also discovered on Pinterest a FREE "Pin the Mustache on Mario" printable that I had blown up poster-size at CopyMax. I cut the mustaches out with my Mustaches CutUps

Another game we did was "Goomba Stomping" the kids had 5 minutes to stomp as many of their colored Goombas (aka balloons) as possible. :) 

I made little signs for the food with a variety of fonts and colors and some Mario stickers.

Party decorations in the mario theme are not easy to find and are expensive, so I bought a basic party pack from Target, and one pack of those vinyl decals for walls in a Mario theme. Ev moved all the decals to his room after the party.

The final thing to share are the thank you notes. The party pack came with invitations that I didn't need since I made the others, but I used some Nestabilities to cut out the Marios from the invitations to make thank you notes.

And that's all for me today, thanks for popping by! 

hugs, Noelle