My son is turning 5 this week... FIVE! For his party, he wants a Jake and the Pirates birthday. With our newest addition, I'm just not wanting to do much in the way of sewing and whatnot... and since we have so much cardboard, I decided to make good use of it.
To start... paper bags make great map invites! I cut open the bag, made the whole thing wet, crumpled and straightened it out, then let it dry before ripping into the size needed for the invites. I printed Jake logos and glued them on, then used Sharpees to write out the info (and make the 'map' portion). The boys loved them!
Bram really wants a scavenger hunt (oops... ahem, a TREASURE hunt) at his birthday, so I'll be making maps of our yard similar to the invites, and the end will lead to the treasure... a chest full of loot bags for each guest. So... to make a treasure chest, I used a box.
Yes... this is kind of a 'before and after' pic, side by side as I had two of the same box. I just turned the one inside out (yes, that is a thing, haha), cut it to make it have a rounded lid, and used extra pieces of cardboard and black duct tape to trim it up. And sharpees make it look like wood. ;)
Since I thought it would be fun to have the boys pretend to be pirates, I wanted them to have swords they could keep. Unfortunately, they no longer had them at the Dollarama. :( But hey, I've got loads of cardboard... I can make them! I cut 12 pieces of 'sword' and glued two together for each sword, then drew on them to make wood grain. Bram loves them! He and A played with them for awhile while wearing the paper 'pirate hats' I made for the party as well. I'm hoping to make a few things so that the boys can 'decorate' their own hats, but we'll see how much more I wish to do. I also bought some cute stick on mustaches from the dollar store... a pack has 6, which is perfect.
Yesturday I pulled out a bunch of cardboard and fashioned two pirate ships from them... the boys will be able to play in the ships (hopefully, weather permitting and all that). I need more duct tape so I can properly assemble them, and I am just going to use sharpees once again to draw on some portholes and planks. I also aim to take a board and make a 'walk the plank' out of it for the boys from our deck (which is going to be the Jolly Roger on our maps, haha). Today I want to make the two large maps (Bram wants there to be two teams of 3 looking for the treasure chest), and maybe the signs for on the yard to help them know what each area is (I'm making a Skull Rock, Pixie Hollow, etc with a sign on something that could kinda sorta be that in our yard). I think decorations will be limited to that and balloons at the end of the driveway and maybe on the ships and by the food and stuff. I'm still not sure how to do his cake. He wants Bucky... but I'm not sure I want to do a complicated cake. I'm so tired lately, and my two youngest girls are so very clingy this week... we'll see what I can get to. Otherwise I was thinking of making cupcakes to look like a treasure map. No cake cutting required.
So much fun stuff you can make out of what is essentially trashed. :) I LOVE it!
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