Alice in Wonderland Party: Games

We put a little tea set in the sand pit so that the toddlers could host their own Mad Hatter's tea party.



The Cheshire Cat I painted was used for a "pin the smile on the Cheshire Cat" game.





Alice plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts using flamingos. Ideally, I'd have liked to have bought proper croquet mallets and painted them to look like flamingos. However, I couldn't justify the cost (our garden isn't very croquet friendly being hilly and slightly downwards sloping so a croquet set would not get a lot of use). So we made our own using some scrap wood and thick wooden dowelling (total cost: about £3).



These are the party bags we sent the kids home with. The girls each got a little Cheshire Cat purse, but the boys ended up with Doctor Who and Spiderman items as it was difficult to find Alice in Wonderland themed stuff to suit them! There were also prizes for the games such as an Alice in Wonderland Audio and book set (only cost me £2!). The party bag fillers all came from a site called Mummy Martin's Toy Box.

Alice in Wonderland Party: Food

Here are a few snaps of the food from our party:




This is my first ever attempt at a topsy turvy cake (also known as a Mad Hatter cake - very appropriate for the theme of the party!).

This type of cake is not for the faint hearted as it is quite complicated. I had no idea where to start so read the tutorial on Cake Central. Being a bit of a cake baking novice, I then decided it was too complicated so I simplified my own version and was still pretty pleased with the result.





We served traditional tea party type food - cakes, biscuits and little sandwiches.



If I was better at icing, I probably would have done something clever and iced "eat me" onto the cakes. But I did this in the most simplified way I could think of, and just made cute little signs with a toothpick.



This was the kids' drinks. I collected and cleaned empty juice bottles, covered them in pretty bright paper and added a "drink me" label.


I'm hoping to do a blog post on the party games next week.

Alice in Wonderland Party: Decorations

After a turbulent couple of months and the distraction of the school summer holidays, I am finally ready to start uploading the Alice in Wonderland photos. Today's topic: the decorations.




The Cheshire Cat. Drawn onto wooden board, cut out and then painted with acrylic. The windmill flowers were 99p Shop finds.





We had two playing card soldiers and half a dozen blow up flamingoes.




Inside was decorated with paper lanterns.

You can see the table here, scattered with mini playing cards. There are two teapots on the table with (fake) white roses, which the Card Gardeners have painted red!





The white fabric roses were bought in a Pound Shop. I painted them with red water based paint.



This is the sideboard. We covered it with playing card confetti (from a party supply store), a playing card tower, a bottle labeled "drink me" and a mysterious key.







Playing card towers were placed at strategic points around our house. To keep them standing in the presence of excitable children, the cards are held together with discrete cardboard tabs.



And finally, we blew up fifty red and black helium balloons. I used a heart shaped hole punch on the playing cards then threaded them to the curling ribbon.

Posts on the party games and food to come at a later date!

TARDIS Birthday Cake

Apologies to anyone who has been checking back for the promised Alice in Wonderland posts. They say bad things happen in threes, and the last month we've been hit by several life affecting and stressful events which have taken my attention away from the blog.

But I've got a few minutes, so here is the TARDIS birthday cake I did for my son's 5th birthday (sorry about the poor quality photo):



Because of outside stresses, I only had 2 hours to construct and decorate the cake when I'd planned to spend most of the day doing it. Luckily 5 year olds don't care about perfection and he was thrilled with it!

Hopefully I will - finally - get the party pics up fairly soon, as long as life is returning to normal for us :-s

How to Make a Dormouse Costume

Since this weekend is my son’s birthday and I’m making a TARDIS cake, I’m going to put off blogging about the Alice in Wonderland party until next week when (hopefully) I’ll have more time. Today I’m going to write a little bit about making a dormouse costume.

Here are a couple of photos of my youngest dressed as a dormouse. It was incredibly difficult to get a decent photo of him in his fancy dress outfit because (a) he wont stay still for more than 2.5 seconds and (b) he doesn’t like anything on his head so won’t put his hood up to show off the mouse ears I sewed on.





The dormouse costume was made with a brown hooded top, a pair of brown trousers, some foam cover wire and some peach coloured craft foam. The first bit I did was the tail. First I removed some of the foam coating from around one end of the wire, then used pliers to bend the newly exposed wire into a loop. I then used a small pair of scissors to make the other end of the tail more rounded, by snipping off small pieces of foam. Once this was done I sewed the tail onto the back of the trousers.

Next I did the ears. I cut out two teardrop shapes, cut off the top of each one then folded each one in half and sewed the bottom edge together to create a more natural ear shape, (it’s difficult to explain but hopefully you can understand what I mean from the photos). I then sewed the ears onto each side of the hood using peach coloured thread. And that’s all I had to do to make a dormouse costume. If I’d had a little more time I’d probably have made a little bow tie and sewn it onto the top.

All the children looked great at the party. Among the Alice in Wonderland costumes for boys we had playing cards, Mad Hatters, white rabbits and Tweedle Dum. When it came to the girls we, of course, had Alice in Wonderland costumes, but also a white rabbit, butterfly and Tweedle Dee.

Check back over the next few weeks to see photos of the party decorations, food and games!

Doctor Who Cakey Goodness!

Just a brief post today as I'm busy attempting to bake a Mad Hatter cake (also known as a Topsy Turvy cake) for this weekend's party. Expect lots of Alice in Wonderland party posts in the next few weeks!

I’ve been looking around a lot at cakes recently as my son’s birthday is coming up and he’s been asking for a Doctor Who cake. I’m leaning towards doing a Tardis cake since I found out Dr Oetker’s ready coloured icing packs now come with blue in the box (I tried colouring my own blue icing for his first birthday when I did a Pocoyo cake - never again!).

I’ve found some really fabulous cakes on the ‘net, which I’ll share here for other cake baking parents with Doctor Who mad sons!

fandomania.com/fandomestic-10-brilliant-doctor-who-themed-cakes

I love number 2 on the list. It’s similar to what I have in mind for my son, except I don’t think mine will turn out this amazing!

But the best ones I’ve found were featured on the Sunday Sweets section of Cake Wrecks:

cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2009/08/sunday-sweets-doctor-who.html

Check out the last featured cake where the baker actually decorated the inside of the Tardis too, with mirrors and LEDs. That’s not a cake, that’s a work of art.

My Cake Creations

I always like looking at other people’s cake baking creations, so I thought I’d share mine.

This was my first attempt at a child's birthday cake (for my son’s first birthday). With hind sight, not the greatest cake ever made but my son could recognise the characters and he liked it, which is what counts!




This was his second birthday cake (Gromit). I kept the design really, really simple that year as I was pregnant with his brother and the sight of food made me feel nauseous! It was still an improvement on my cake decorating attempt for his first birthday.



This was his third birthday cake. It was based on a Thomas the Tank Engine design by Debbie Brown (I think the book it’s from is out of print now - “Favourite Character Cakes“). I altered the design and did Gordon, partly because Gordon is number 3, but mostly because Dr Oetker didn’t do ready coloured blue icing at that point and I didn’t want to colour my own!



Here’s the Ben 10 cake I did for his forth birthday. I had planned something more elaborate, but a family member being hospitalised meant I had very little time for cake baking in the end. I’m quite pleased with it considering the decorating literally only took me an hour!



Now for son number 2’s birthday cakes! This was his first one, inspired by a cake in Debbie Brown’s Wallace and Gromit Cracking Celebration Cakes. I actually enjoyed modelling all the little bunnies and this might be my favourite cake I‘ve ever baked.



This was his most recent birthday cake. It is also based on a Debbie Brown design, except I used Pato (from Pocoyo) rather than Spot.



This Mr Men cake is the one I baked for my other half’s thirtieth. Yet again, it is a Debbie Brown design (I copied this one faithfully though).



The Peppa Pig cake is the only girl’s cake I’ve ever baked! It was for my friend’s daughter’s birthday.



Finally, here is the ghost cake I made for the Halloween. I believe it was from “Storybook Cakes” by Lindy Smith. It was really easy to make and didn’t take long.



With two birthdays coming up I should be able to share more of my cakes soon!

How To Make a TARDIS (Doctor Who)

These are pictures of our new homemade TARDIS. It wasn’t actually made for a party, but I thought it would be a nice thing to include on this blog because it’s a great Doctor Who themed party idea.

How much it costs and how long it takes is going to depend on what materials are available. Fortunately ours cost next to nothing as the only thing we didn’t have was the light and the door handles, both of which were cheap to buy.

Here is what we used:

* A large, unused TV cabinet - It was just sitting unloved in the toy shed so I decided to put it to better use! Obviously not many people have a large TV cabinet they aren’t using conveniently lying around, but you can buy them in second hand shops, boot sales, charity shops, etc for very little. Or if you are fairly confident with a saw, a hammer and some nails you can buy some wood from a DIY store and construct the box yourself.

* Wooden trimming (for the door panels)

* Scrap wood (for embellishing the top of the TARDIS).

* Paint - We happened to have a nice dark blue paint (“Dramatic” by Crown) left over from painting a feature wall in littlest boy’s bedroom. It took barely any paint at all to put a couple of coats on the TARDIS, so if you don’t have anything suitable already you’ll probably only need a very small pot of paint. Even poster paint might do (£1 - £2 for a large bottle), depending on the wood you are using.

* Door handles - We bought a cheap multipack of value door handles for about £2.50.

* Light - We used a circular handheld torch which cost less than £5.

This is how we went about making our TARDIS:

1) First of all we removed the doors and chopped off the legs of the TV cabinet, and turned it on its side.

2) We took out the two shelves, cut them to size and used hinges to hang them on the front as the TARDIS’s doors.

3) Using wood trimming we created a panel effect on the doors, using tiny nails to hold them in place. The TARDIS actually has eight panels, but the size of the cabinet meant compromising and having only six.

4) To create the POLICE BOX sign we cut some scrap wood to size and fixed it to the top of the TARDIS.

5) Using more scrap, we hammered two blocks of wood on top, slightly smaller than the top of the TV cabinet, to create the shape of the roof of the TARDIS.

6) We painted the TARDIS with two coats of blue paint.

7) Once this was dry I painted the windows with black acrylic paint.

8) Then we added the door handles.

9) Next we added the Police Box sign, the public notice and the St John’s ambulance symbol. The public notice was done on Word, the Police Box sign made on Paint Shop Pro (I used Sergoe Script), and I found a St John’s ambulance clip art via Google Images. The Police Box sign had to be constructed from 3 separate images, each roughly the width of a page of A4.

10) Finally, we put the light on top. The back is magnetic so it sticks to the top of a nail we used to hold the wood in place on top of the TV cabinet.

My boys love it. As you can see in the third picture, my eldest has decorated it with posters from the Doctor Who Adventures magazine!

Alice in Wonderland - White Rabbit Costume

I’m going to kick off this blog with something I’ll be doing quite a few posts on in the coming weeks - our upcoming Alice in Wonderland party. It’s only a few weeks away now but I’ve been planning it and busily painting white roses red, drawing Cheshire cats and making flamingo croquet mallets for a good couple of months already.

In this first Alice in Wonderland related post I’m going to share how to make a White Rabbit costume, like the one my son is wearing in the picture here:



I actually made this costume before we even decided to do the party, as his school were doing an Alice in Wonderland theme for World Book Day (at least I think that was it - there seem to be several official Book Days or Book Weeks now). It was very easy to put together, which is just as well as I only had 5 days notice that it was needed.

It was around Easter time so rabbit ears were plentiful. The ones I got were from a local party supply store and cost a couple of pounds. I’ve also seen them I pound shops, usually along with items aimed at Hen parties. The bunny ears I bought are fluffy and a little girly, but fortunately my son is too young to worry about this! I added a waistcoat, which butched up the outfit a bit. He had outgrown the waistcoat he wore to a wedding a year or so ago, but fortunately I had a little halter neck waistcoat sitting in my fabric box which I had kept for the pretty embroidered material. I shortened the neck for a better fit, and it now looks great him on him despite the fact it is a little baggy and loose on the back.

Most of the time I spent making the White Rabbit costume was on the little pocket watch. I’m sure you can probably buy something suitable at a reasonable price, but I didn’t have the time to look and didn’t want to spend more than I had to. So I made one out of junk I had already. To start with, I superglued two Pringles lids together - with the top sides facing out - with a string of gold chain protruding from between the lids. To make sure this wasn’t going to fall apart I then added small tabs of tape all around the edge. Next I cut out two circles of gold cards and glued them to either side of the watch. On one side I created a watch face out of a smaller circle made from white card. I did consider making the watch more realistic by attaching little cardboard hands to the white card circle with a paper fastener, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort when the watch may not last a day of rough playground games. So I drew the watch face on with permanent marker instead. The last thing I had to do was sew the other end of the gold chain to the inside of the waistcoat.

So that is son no.1’s costume ready for the Alice in Wonderland party. My partner and I will be wearing shop bought King and Queen of Hearts fancy dress outfits. As much as I’d like to have a go at making an exact replica of the Disney Queen of Heart’s dress I don’t have the time to sew it all by hand (I have no sewing machine!). Looking around online, more industrious people have managed to make some really amazing homemade Queen of Hearts costumes entirely from scratch.

My next job is making my littlest boy an Alice in Wonderland dormouse costume!