We just had K1’s birthday party last week, and I’m still really proud of how well it came together. So, in case anyone is interested in having a knights’ birthday party, here is a ridiculously inexpensive (if somewhat time consuming) plan for a great party:
The invitations were printed on cheap manila paper so that it looked like parchment. I had thoughts of burning or tearing the edges to make it look more authentic, but then I remembered that they were six. They read:
Hear Ye! Hear Ye!
A knightly celebration
honoring the bravest knight,
Sir K1 of the royal house of peanut
hOnoring his sixth birthday
To be held sunday March 9th
For the entire enchanted kingdom
Making merry from two o’clock To five o’clock
Festivities will be at the castle
address
RSVP to Queen peanut at number
I rolled them up and tied them with ribbon we had lying around the house, and we hand delivered them to the guests.
To decorate, I took a pack of construction paper and cut it into big triangles. I punched two holes in the base of each triangle, then threaded lengths of yarn through the holes. I taped these up over all the doorways and windows. And, of course, there were balloons all over the place.
When the kids arrived, they made their goblets (disposable plastic wine glasses from the party store with a sparkly letter sticker for their monogram and stick on ‘jewels’ that I found on clearance). Then they put on their tunics (foot wide strips of leftover red and green fabrics with a head hole cut out, with their names written in glitter glue on the front, tied with thin strips of more leftover fabric) and went outside to play in the castle made from cardboard boxes I sweet-talked from the appliance shop (http://www.mrmcgroovys.com/t-plans-cardboard-castle.aspx) . I didn’t buy Mr. McGroovy’s rivets – we just used his plan, and put brads in instead. We did cover the brads with packing tape so nobody would get poked with one accidentally. It was very stable and strong!
We played some games – hot potato with a plastic potato from our toys, knights of the round table (the old telephone game, but set in medieval times), catch the dragon’s tail, and pin the dragon breath on the dragon (found an image on the web, covered up the breath in Publisher, had it printed big, then printed out enough breaths for everyone at the party to stick one on). We had more games ready to go, using the red tunics and green tunics as different teams, but when they really didn’t get the idea behind catch the dragon’s tail, I decided to skip them. Then I brought out the foam swords – $2 a piece at Dollar General. They played with those for a LONG time. A word of warning: the rule is that swords are only for hitting other swords, not people. They’ll miss and hit each other anyway, but the foam doesn’t really hurt. They just get their feelings hurt if someone is really trying to hit them. For their bravery, each was crowned with their very own Burger King crown (I politely asked for a ridiculous number of crowns, and the lady just handed them over!).
Then it was time for cake and ice cream (originally, we were just going to have cake, but one of the guests can’t have cake, and the ice cream was “buy one, get one free” and I had a coupon for one free anyway, so…. we had ice cream). The cake was a castle made from 3 boxes of angel food mix, 4 recipes of homemade buttercream icing, a tube of black decorator icing, a little cocoa, and some edible glitter. The knight and dragon fighting on the castle were from the children’s toy collection. I don’t actually recommend angel food cake for this – I was trying to find a cake mix without partially hydrogenated oil in it, and that’s all there was. The angel food doesn’t cut well (bad for you who is trying to make the cake, bad for little kids trying to eat the cake with a plastic fork), and some of the kids were freaked out by the different taste and texture. Fortunately, my kids loved it, so that was okay. Anybody have a decent, kid-approved recipe for cake that doesn’t involve partially hydrogenated oil?
Back to the cake – I made 2 9×13 sheet cakes and 2 loaf pans. I used the icing to glue the sheet cakes to each other, and then icing-glued the loaves on. Oh, I cut the loaves down so they would fit on top of the sheet cakes. Then I icing-glued 4 “cake” ice cream cones to 4 sugar cones to look like towers. I tinted the frosting gray by beating in some of the black decorator icing (which unfortunately had partially hydrogenated oil in it), and covered the whole cake in icing. Using a toothpick, I drew lines in the icing to make it look like stone work. Then I cut off the tips of the cones and iced the cone-towers. I sprinkled on some silver edible glitter, then sat 2 towers on each loaf. After touching up the icing at the tower-rampart junction, I put candles into the tips of the towers and at the front of the ramparts. I used the kind that have a little plastic cup with a spike at the bottom – made it a lot easier! Then I tinted the remaining frosting brown with lots of cocoa and thinned it out so that I could fingerpaint doors and windows onto the castle. I used a Wilton round decorating tip attached to the tube of black frosting to outline the windows and doors and paint chains for the drawbridge. See Castle Cake picture (don’t use the preview, it doesn’t look right).
And then it was back outside to slay the dragon (see Dragon pinata picture). I found an idea to make a Chinese dragon out of a brown paper bag, which was obviously going to be a lot easier than making a paper mache one but the Chinese dragon wasn’t really what a knight would be fighting. So, I improvised. I put half the candy in one paper bag, and attached a snout to the front of it by cutting a lunch bag down, lightly stuffing it with crumpled newspaper, and taping the snout onto the rest of the head. I cut the head about 8″ down the center (cutting the bigger faces of the bag) and folded and stapled the sides back and in to make the ears. Then I put the rest of the candy in another bag, and stapled the bottom of that bag to the back of the dragon head. I probably should have dropped it a bit, so it didn’t look like the dragon’s chin was level with it’s stomach, but I wasn’t about to rip out all those staples. I stapled one more bag to the inside of the body (think double bagged, but one is about a foot out), and tapered that one into the beginning of a tail. Then I rolled up newspaper and tapered and stapled that into the whole tail. I pinched and stapled the top of the whole body and tail part to form a ridge. Next, I folded newspaper into triangles of decreasing size and stapled them onto the ridge, and then one at the very tip of the tail. I also rolled up newspaper and stapled it into a right angle for little legs. These were also stapled onto the body.
I bought a pack of dark green tissue paper, and had some black, orange, yellow and red tissue paper on hand. I cut the green tissue paper along the long side into approximately 4″ strips and stacked them together. I cut 2″ into those 4″ about every inch or so, making fringed strips of tissue paper. I glued these on the whole dragon except for the spikes on the tail and back. Start at the bottom, or else you’ll be lifting the fringe to place the next strip. I wrapped each spike in black tissue paper. I had some red glitter glue left from Valentine’s day, and I spread some of that on all the black pieces. For eyes, I cut a white oval and black circles out of construction paper and glued them onto the head. I wrapped some red, orange and yellow tissue paper together in a kind of flowering cone, and stapled that to the dragon’s chin. I put a little silver glitter on the belly, and I really should have just used a different color for the belly. But there it was, a dragon! Filled with candy!
We had plastic party favor bags in a medieval kind of pattern, and again were on clearance. There were about 4 pounds of candy in there. When the kids weren’t making much progress on the pinata, I spritzed the bottom of it with water to make it easier (you know, that whole “couldn’t find his way out of a wet paper bag comment? yeah…) Finally, the dragon was slain. Then the kids ate way too much candy and continued romping around in the castle and fighting each other with swords until it was time to go home. The girls were ready for another quiet activity before the party was over, so I read them a story about Custard the Cowardly Dragon while the boys kept carousing. I had Good Night, Good Knight waiting in the wings, but it became a bedtime story instead.
Everyone had a really good time. They went home with a costume, sword, goblet and candy. We ended up having a playdate the next day for K2’s friends, just to get a little more fun out of the castle, and we even had enough leftover supplies to make goblets again.
If you’re still reading this, you must actually be planning a party, because frankly, writing this has made it seem much less exciting than I thought it was when I started writing. So have fun, and happy birthday!
