For a party like this our Polka-dot invites are just perfect, and youcan order them in several different colours to really brighten things up. We held the party on our covered verandah (a good thing, since it rained on the day) and made it look very festive with strings of papel picado and a bright plastic tablecloth on the food table. I set up four workstations (a camping table, a children's outdoor table and two makeshift tables created by putting whiteboards over smaller play tables - those were perfect for messy activities). There was a painting table, a playdough table (I made the playdough in the morning using a recipe from 'Your Child' magazine), a beading table and a table for making Ben10 Omnitrixes. The boys had great fun painting and glittering their Ben10 crafts.
For snacks we made mini-hot dogs with baby pork sausages and cocktail rolls. These were very popular (with the adults as well as the children). There were cupcakes, of course, and we had let our children decorate these so they were very proud to show them off to their friends. A few sweets and some chips (no tartrazine, no msg) rounded off the snacks and this was plenty - we actually had a lot of leftover sweets and chips, though the cupcakes and hot dogs were polished off.
The most fun part, for me, was making smocks for all our guests. With all the paint and playdough, I didn't want anyone's clothes ruined. I used a wonderfully easy pattern from Amy Karol's 'Bend-the-rules Sewing', and the smocks were a real hit. Of course, I forgot I would want to blog about the party, and failed to take photos of the smocks before they were all taken home by their new owners. But you can see the basic design in the lovely version shown here, which is taken from the bend-the-rules flickr group.
