Skylanders Birthday Party

For my son's 7th birthday, he wanted to have a Skylanders Party.  Unclear on what this means?  Skylanders is an interactive game where the figurine of each Skylander comes to life through the Portal of Power and the player can then manipulate that character on the screen through various video game systems (we use the Wii, but it can be played on XBOX, Playstation, etc).  It's pretty cool, actually. You can read all about Skylanders at www.skylanders.com.

I did some shopping on Etsy for party supplies - you can read more details here about my "shopping trip".  For the invitations, I found these very cool Skylander cards through DenimGraphics.

 

I also purchased files to create the personalized banner and favor tags from Kid Invitations and Lulu Cole, respectively.

For the cake (and favors!), I was inspired by Amy's Party Ideas blog post on the Skylanders Birthday she styled.  It was a lot easier than I expected to be and even got to have my BFF in town to help me decorate it!  Make sure you check out this blog post for step by step instructions on how to build your own Portal of Power cake!

For the food, I asked my son to help me make the menu based on what the Skylanders eat....so it was pretty random.  Then we took names of various Skylanders and made cards to go along with each item.  We served:  Pop Fizz's PB&J, Warnado's Watermelon, Tree Rex's Tacos (using my Crockpot Chicken Tacos), Prism Break's Pretzels, Cynder's Cinnamon Rolls, Chop Chop's Cheese, Eruptor's Eggs, and Ghost Roaster's Grapes.

Our party colors were geared towards the packaging of all of the Skylanders merchandise - and their logo of course. 

For entertainment, we hired "Tim the Balloon Guy".  We met him a few years ago as he is at the Chick-fil-a Family Fun nights and have hired him for some of our past parties.  He's quite talented - he made lots of Skylanders, bows and arrows, shields, masks, dogs, flowers, and even a Minnie Mouse.  A friend of mine shared a photo of the Skylander Hot Head with me that he took with his iPhone - it was impressive!  I took the other one of a party guest fully ready for battle!

We also played a game that my son came up with - "Pin The Tail On Spyro".  I found an image of Spyro along with the Skylanders logo and did a little work in Photoshop to merge them together and remove his tail.  I had it printed at Office Max on an 18" x 24" piece of paper.  Then I used Photoshop again to just get the image of the tail and printed those on card stock for the kids to use. 

Finally, for the party favors, I made white chocolate Wii remotes using this candy mold.  Once they were slipped into a bag, tied with colorful ribbon and a personalized favor tag attached, they were the perfect parting gift for our guests.

My son and I had a lot of fun planning this party together.  I hope he'll want to continue to plan future parties with me!