One up

Tassy had been planning her tenth birthday party for months. She decided early on that she wanted a video game themed party. Then the pressure was on - constantly "What games can we play?". She wasn't talking about playing video games (good, cos I wouldn't go for that) but video game themed party games. Have you heard of any? No, me neither. More on that later....

I happened upon an awesome idea for invitations on Pinterest. There's a link to the printable pattern there. It went perfectly with our video game theme and our love of pop up cards and books! I SO love these invitations. Although my fingers didn't love them.

Tassy dressed up as Princess Peach, complete with yellow umbrella with a smiley face. I didn't get a photo of her with props but dad snapped this one out the front - also featuring her follow-the-pacman-to-the-front-door. It's a bit hard to see with the dappled light.

I think what might have originally given Tassy the idea of a video game party was an ice cube tray we've had for a while. She asked if we could use it to make chocolates and I said yes. I think her brain ticked on from there... The chocolates turned out pretty cool!

She requested some toad cupcakes too.

Now for some games!

It took me a month or so before I came up with the idea of "Character Bingo". Tassy chose and downloaded 24 pictures of game characters and I put them into 14 bingo sheets. This was no easy task cos each bingo sheet had to be different! But the game was a big hit. After all the work I put into it I won't be deleting the files from my computer so sing out if you'd like me to email you 14 bingo sheets!

While Tassy was surfing the net she found all the versions of Mario through the years and thought it would be fun to play "Chrono-Mario". So I gave each person a pile of Marios and they had to arrange them in chronological order. Can you work out the order?

We also played a version of Celebrity Heads using the same video game characters from Bingo. It was good to have the Bingo sheet to refer to cos I don't think anyone knew ALL the characters. I didn't get a photo of that game {sad face}. And we did pass the parcel too. Tassy thought they might be too old for PtP but I said my friend's 16yo daughter requested it at her recent birthday party LOL.

It must be time for cake! I had been to keen to do a rainbow cake for Tassy's birthday last year but she had other ideas. She also had other ideas for this year but I talked her into a rainbow Pacman cake. :) The cake looked fantastic inside!

Lastly - party bags! I remembered seeing things printed onto brown paper bags on Pinterest a while ago so thought I'd try printing Pacman games onto some paper bags. I found a picture of a game, removed the black background, then attempted printing. My printer must have been hungry cos it ate quite a few of the paper bags. I had about a 50% success rate but I didn't give up and in the end I got enough. I do love how they turned out!

Even before her party day she had chosen her theme for next year. Movies!