Shark Birthday Party

My friend Amy's little boy was turning six and he requested a shark themed birthday party.  How cool is that?  Amy is always helping out at every party, she's the cupcake queen, so I was so glad she let me help out on Ethan's big day.

Amy is a super talented cupcake and cake decorator, you can see for yourself at her blog, Indulge With Me.  Seriously, her skills blow me away.

I just stuck to creating a few decorations for the party.  Amy did the hard work.

 I created this little shark invitation.  I made a template, and Amy and I cut out the pieces and assembled them.  Amy wrote all the party information on the inside and even wrote "Come or be shark bait!"  Haha love it!

 For the front door I made this sign.  I looked on the Internet at several shark warning signs and settled on this one.  I took a 12x12 piece of yellow paper and rounded the edges.  I used my Cricut and my Sure Cuts a Lot Program and cut out the letters and shark from black paper and glued it on.  Super simple.

 Every party needs a birthday banner.  Amy had this great idea to hang a net from her ceiling and I thought it would be fun to hand the fish in this.  I cut the fish out using my Cricut and then glued on the letters (that were also cut from my Cricut).  Since Ethan was the birthday boy he needed to be the shark so I used the same shark image as I did on the door, enlarged it, and hung it using thread.  It looked like it was swimming.  The fish were hung with paper clips to look like hooks in their mouths.

 I don't know where this idea came from but at the last minute (literally) I drew a shark onto a poster board.  If you look closely at the bottom right you'll see all the swimmers.  I cut out stick swimmers and wrote all the boys names on them.  They played pin the swimmer in the sharks mouth.

 For the gift bags, Amy wanted to make a cute tag.  I hand drew a surf board and we cut them out of striped scrapbook paper.  We had to make sure there was a shark bite out of them!  I then made a stencil using my Cricut and we painted on the shark in the middle and wrote the kids names on the board.  I thought that this could be something the boys might want to keep for a little while so we made them more permanent by laminating them and punching a scrap booking eyelet through them.  We strung it using elastic thread so the boys could easily hook it to their backpacks if they wanted to.  Amy did the cute bag.

Now here's where my involvement stops and you get to see the pure genius which is Amy and her husband, Jared.  I'll tell you a little bit about what she did but full details are HERE at Amy's blog.

 She made this cake.  For reals.  When regular people like me would have drawn a shark on a sheet cake, Amy took it to a whole other level.

 Red velvet.  Nothing says shark party like a whole bunch of gore!  This girl thought of everything.

 The day before she made these cupcakes for her sons class at school.  It's basically a twinkie, and a cookie half.  I tell you what these were not easy but come on, those are seriously the coolest cupcakes ever.  EVER.  She has more details HERE.

 There was another party on the street that day so Jared cleverly put a shark fin on the mailbox with cardboard so the guests knew exactly which party they were looking for.

 When the boys walked in they had to walk through sea weed.

 Yes it's a shark watermelon.  Yes those are Swedish fish in his mouth and yes this is amazing!

 Jared made these killer plates.  What a fun and simple detail.  He cut a slit in the plate and stuck the fin through.

I didn't stick around for the party but I heard it was a hit and the boys left with some awesome shark stuff too! 

Thanks Amy for letting me help out and thanks for being so amazing and inspiring!

__________________________________