Star Wars Birthday Party

Wyatt turned seven years old yesterday and we had a Star Wars birthday party for him on Saturday to celebrate. This was the first time he’s had a “friends” party at our house and it went really well. I think the kids (and I!) all had a really good time! Here are some of the details:

Invitations

I made the invitations myself and I was super happy with how they turned out. In fact, this might have been my favorite thing I made for the party. The Clone Trooper was from an official Clone Wars desktop wallpaper that I downloaded (unfortunately, I can’t find the original source, but I’m pretty sure it was from lucasarts.com). I cut him out, flipped him and resized him to fit the card. I used a free font called Star Jedi for the Star Wars-y looking headers.

I’d love to make this available as a download, but because I used a copyrighted character, I’m pretty sure it’s not legal to do so. From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s OK to do something like this for personal use, but not OK to distribute it.

Activities

I planned three main activities for the party. The first was a craft project where the boys assembled paper Star Wars characters. I printed and cut the figures out before the party to save time and then coached the boys through the process of folding and taping the figures. It was a little tricky for some of them but we managed to make it work. The figures we used can be found here:

The highlight of the party for the boys were these homemade light sabers. I saw a lot of suggestions online to use pool noodles but they are almost impossible to find in late September so I had to search out a substitute. I finally found the brilliant suggestion to use pipe insulation on the fowlerfam blog. I bought six 6-foot tubes at Home Depot for about a dollar a piece and cut them down to a manageable length. Then I decorated the ends with duct tape and colored electrical tape .

I had planned to bring these out in the last hour or so of the party but Wyatt announced that we had light sabers in the first five minutes so I handed them out right at the beginning. The boys loved them and immediately started wailing on each other. In fact, they were hitting each other so hard that I felt like I needed to double-check that the light sabers weren’t hurting the kids. They assured me that they didn’t hurt at all though so I let them carry on.

I had also planned to have the kids play a couple games of tag but they were having so much fun with the light sabers that I couldn’t tear them away. The first tag game I had planned was Star Wars Tag, a variation on TV tag where you can prevent the person who is It from tagging you by yelling out the name of a Star Wars character and touching the ground. The other game was Dark Side Tag. In this game, one person is selected to be Darth Vadar. When Darth tags someone, that person has to “join the Dark Side” by linking arms with the person who tagged him. As more people are tagged, the blob of kids who are It gets bigger and bigger. I thought they would be fun, but alas! — it wasn’t meant to be.

Cake

The idea for Wyatt’s light saber cake came from Make and Takes. I baked a batch of cupcakes, then frosted some with grey frosting and others with green frosting and arranged them in a line.

Wyatt wanted red velvet cupcakes, so I baked up a batch with Martha’s recipe. While I was putting them together, he asked if I could make them green instead, so I swapped in green food coloring for the red called for in the recipe.

They stayed really green even after baking, which looked pretty cool. The boys labeled them “Yoda cupcakes” and made a number of jokes about Yoda’s butt being an ingredient. Not to surprising coming from a group of 7 and 8 year olds.

We also served “Milenneum Falcon” pizzas (just regular pizzas with a silly name) and “Yoda Sodas”. The Yoda Sodas were lime sherbet and Sprite floats. The kids were doubtful at first but once they tasted them, they were won over.

My big takeaways from this party:

Star Wars parties are really easy to put together because there are so many fantastic ideas out there on the internet already. The hardest part is picking your favorites. If you give 10 little boys foam light sabers they will whack each other with them for 2 hours straight and will only stop to eat if you make them.

How about you? Have your thrown a Star Wars party? What fun stuff did you do for it?