TMNT birthday party

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

Heroes in a half-shell.

Turtle power!

I love that my kids watch a show that I watched as a kid!

My middle son has become a fan of TMNT. So we decided it would make a fun theme for his 7th birthday party.

I created this invite in my SCAL2 software and cut it on my Cricut.



 I made him a banner in the turtle colors and the balloon idea is from here. It's just crepe paper and paper eyes. I cut white ovals and drew the black pupils. Only I forgot to give mine mouths!

 (p.s. I know there is supposed to be an orange turtle and not a yellow one. But I could not find orange crepe paper in my town!)

We served pizza for lunch since that is the turtles' favorite food after all!

He wanted his cake to look like a pizza too. I baked the cake in a large round cake pan (14" maybe), frosted with tan frosting (white frosting tinted with brown, yellow, and peach color gels) , used red frosting for the sauce, grated white chocolate for the cheese, fruit rollups for pepperoni and bell peppers, and licorice for the olives.

 

I found these cute Lego candles and just had to use them! (nothing to do with TMNT but they are cute.)

I made these cute mini pizza boxes from kraft paper (I think the svg template came from here) and gave the kids a decorated sugar cookie to take home.

 I set up a cookie bar with sugar cookies, red, green, black, and white colored frostings, sprinkles, and lots of candies. There are these pouches of cookie icing from Betty Crocker that are easy for kids to squeeze out. And it dries fairly quickly making it somewhat easy to get these home without too much mess. I set out a pizza and a turtle cookie for inspiration. Here's what's left of poor Leonardo...

I'm told he was delicious! His mask is fruit rollup and the candy eyes are from the baking section. The kids may have eaten the fruit rollups and had to create the masks from icing which worked out even better!

These pizza cookies are made with red icing, shredded coconut, grated white chocolate, black licorice, and green fruit rollups.

The kids came up with all kinds of crazy cookies. I wish I took pics of them! I only got one plate that one of my kids made:

 Our little cookie taste tester!

The boys also got to make their own Mutagen Ooze! This was such a huge hit and everyone loved it. It was so easy to make too. Recipe found here. It's just made of water, borax, clear school glue, and food coloring. Instead of the cool container in the link I just used these food containers I found at Walmart. They were inexpensive (a pack of 4 for a buck-something), the lime green lid matched the party!, and the container is wide enough that kids can play with the ooze without removing it.

 Such a fun party!

My birthday boy:

 Oooooohhhhhh....I almost forgot! See that green punch the boys are getting above?

We called it Ooze punch. I wish I took a pic of that too. It was just powdered lemonade mix and soda. Take enough powder to make 4 quarts. Add just enough water to dissolve it. I probably used a couple cups. Stir and add lots of green food coloring. Then add in 2 2-Liter bottles of lemon-lime soda. I just happened to use Sierra Mist. This got more compliments than I ever expected it would.

 It's a really weird and fun green color:

I decorated the table with a black tablecloth and added strips of yellow washi tape to make it look like a street. (The turtles live under the streets in the sewer you know.) I spray painted a small bucket so that it looked like a sewer pipe (idea from here) and added some of his turtle figurines for décor around the pipe. Of course at this point someone had already spilled punch and everything was moved. See all the wet blue napkins?? :)  Believe it or not I just happened to have a bunch of 12" pizza pans from Dollar Tree just laying around left over from another project so I used them as a charger at each place setting. I thought they went with the pizza theme, of course, but also looked a bit like a round sewer cover too!

The kids left with an armful of goodies. I found these giant coloring books a few weeks ago for $1 at Wal-Mart and snatched them up. I also found TMNT cups at Wal-Mart that we used at the party. They each took their cup, pizza cookie (not pictured here), picked a balloon, plus took all their cookies and ooze.

Thanks for stopping by today!

I would love to know if you use any of these ideas. Please leave me a comment with a link to your blog so I can see your party too!

Linking up to:
Think Pink Sundays
Making the world Cuter Monday
Take it on Tuesday
Link it up Tuesday
 Time to Sparkle
Your Whims Wednesday

Uggh. It's almost May. Why is the flu still here????

I have been sick with the flu or something that's been going around.

Got it on Friday.

It's still here.

Not happy.

I miss my craft room but would rather cuddle up in bed or on the sofa.

My kids however, have been busy. They made some Easter crafts. They wanted to enter them in the kids' contest at Sketches for all. The criteria was that it had to contain a bunny and eggs.

Let me just tell you that this bothered me. So much. What does a bunny have to do with Easter??? It really bugs me when people don't recognize what Easter really is.

But my son knows what it is and his younger brother has an idea. And they really wanted to enter the contest.

Oh, I forgot to say why they were excited to enter.

Remember this?

My 7-year-old entered this in his first online challenge. AND HE WON!!!! We don't have the goodies yet as they are coming from overseas and will take awhile. But he was eager to enter again!

Here is his Easter entry:

 He cut the bunny, chick and egg on my Cricut! Yep, he knows how to use it. It's so cute to watch him!

He added egg stickers and some grass he cut with shaped scissors and he wrote his sentiment.

I think it's so cute!

And my 4-year-old wanted to play too!

Um, yeah. Okay. So there is a bunny on this one on one of the square stickers. That orange thing is supposed to be a chick. And it is saying "Happy Trick or Treat!". Well, that's what it's supposed to say but it's spelled all wrong! Now. On the left side. Is a water buffalo. He insisted it have a water buffalo! I have no idea why. But it had to have one. So it has a blue body and huge yellow horns. And no face.

Oh, this makes me laugh every time I look at it! =D

brothers

Here is a layout I did awhile back and never posted. I just wanted to share since I think the photo of the boys is so cute. Plus, it was one of my first ever layouts.

I did this with a sketch from ScrapbookSteals.com for MidWeek Mojo #1 (they are now on #26, so I'm a  little late posting!!).

The paper and embellishments are from My Mind's Eye Breaking Free kit.

Title is chipboard that I inked.

I just love the way those boys are hugging! It almost makes me forget all the other times they are fighting and kicking and biting each other. Almost.

We like to play with our food

So sometimes just to make lunch or snack time more fun I'll let the kids play with their food. This really helps if there is something new (or boring) I'm trying to get them to eat! I wish I had more photos to share but I just don't usually have the camera in the kitchen. I'll try to photograph these more often because they are fun.

On this particular day I found some popcorn chicken in the freezer (yes, I know it's not the healthiest, but I bought it when I was pregnant and didn't have much energy to cook!) and wanted to use it up. And the only veggies I had to serve were bell peppers. So I cut everything up and arranged it into this:

The sun is a sliced up cheese stick, the peppers are a flower, some Ranch dressing for a cloud and the chicken became the dirt. They had so much fun eating this and they used the other slices (not shown) to create their own masterpieces.

This next one is not so creative. But they loved it too. My kids love to eat quesadillas. And on this day they also wanted a hot dog (these are either turkey dogs or the nitrate-free ones, so they are not sooo bad!). So we turned them into butterflies!

And speaking of hot dogs, that reminds me of one we used to make awhile back. Here is the link to the original post.

This is always a fun one to make. Just cut slits in the bottom two-thirds of the hot dog and boil it with the ramen noodles. When the noodles are done just "fish" : ) out the octopus and add some food coloring to the noodles (along with the flavor pouch of course). The boiling water will curl the legs making it look like an octopus. For even more fun I drew faces with some food safe markers and placed it back into the noodles. You could just use ketchup or mustard to make faces or stick some veggie pieces on it too.

This octopus backfired on me though. Because my then 2-year-old just wanted to play with his new octopus friend instead of eat him!

He really carried this thing around for hours playing with it! One of the legs inevitably broke off and he was so distraught about it. I remember that he even wanted to take this thing with him to the store as his toy. But he eventually set it down and I threw it away without him knowing. =D

Scraptastic

Whew! Just in the nick of time I completed a few more of the challenges from http://www.scrapbooksteals.com/. In the last 36 hours I've done two double layouts, one single layout and a card. The card was a piece of cake (or cupcake) since I make those all the time but the scrapbooking really kicked my butt.

My favorite is the layout of Noah. I love the way the blue and green turned and I love all the circles too. I used this for 2 different challenges. The first was to use at least 6 different patterned papers. I  think I have nine: 1 in the background, 1 in the photo mat, 1 in the alpha chipboard, and 5 more in the circles. Wait, that's only 8. And the second challenge was to use at least 12 elements on a page. I have 1 photo, 1 mat, 7 pieces of chipboard, and 8 circles. I love that cute little face.

The second layout was to use a sketch they provided. Again I used photos of Noah so it could be a double layout for his book. I need to add some journaling and re-align the photos! The sort of slant upwards! And the word sweet doesn't stand out enough. I need to fix it. But considering I did this in less than 15 minutes, it's not too bad.

There will be another page for Wyatt's kindergarten layout making it a double, just haven't gotten to it yet. This was also a sketch challenge. I think it's a little awkward and I don't quite like it yet. Its not how I would normally lay things out. I'll have to figure out how to make it so I like it.

The last challenge I did was a birthday card. I really rushed through this one too. I used a roller stamp on the blue card to create a pattern. I cut pink glitter cardstock with a trim punch and embossed the green paper with polka dots and layered everything. I used chalks on the white cardstock around the cupcake and the sentiment and then finished it off with a couple brads.

The card won me a prize! It wasn't based on talent. Winners were picked randomly. But it was still cool. AND I won two other prizes from participating in the online crop! I love free stuff! I'm still waiting on the prizes to arrive so I don't know what they are yet. The suspense is torture!

...In the Craft Room - 4th of July layout

I actually scrapped pages with current events! This is from last week and not 6 years ago! Wow, this feels good. : ) This is actually for a July 4th challenge from http://www.scrapbooksteals.com/ that is due by tomorrow. So not only did I get to scrap my 2nd layout ever and use current events but I was forced to do it digitally because I couldn't have gotten prints in time for this. It was really fun though, not as fun as traditional scrapping, but still good.

I wish I could get them to fit side by side on here. I worked really hard to get the ribbon lined up and now you can't tell. : (

...at dinner time

This was one of those days when my 4-yr-old didn't take a nap (they are becoming more and more frequent)! By dinner time he was exhausted. Typically I need to call my kids several times before they make it to the table for dinner. But, on this night he was so tired, hungry, delirious that he managed to get pajamas on AND get to the table before dinner was even served. Poor kid was falling asleep before eating. I managed to quickly get dinner done before he was out for good. This was him waiting to eat:

And this was him after dinner. Watch as he slowly falls to the table...

I just thought it was too cute! I HAD to snap some pics! And Daddy was right there ready to catch him in case he fell. He made it to bed about 5 seconds after this shot was taken!