Lego Party Round-Up

If you have young boys (or even older boys), then it’s very likely that their life revolves around LEGO creations like ours does. I love it and encourage the creativity that LEGOs provide. Both my boys play with them almost exclusively, so it was no surprise when they came to me requesting a LEGO themed birthday party. Even though they are two years apart they wanted the same party! Excellent!! Less work for me. I decided to have 2 parties on different days to keep the party day chaos to a minimum and it worked out great!

In all the years of throwing parties, I don’t think I’ve ever purchased pre-made invitations. As a graphic designer, that would just be a major fail on my part. Instead, I’ve always made the invitations at home. At first when the kids were really young, I would make them from scratch, by hand using cut paper and crafty stuff. Lately I am realizing how much time I don’t have anymore to cut and paste for hours on end. My compromise is still to make them myself, but change my qualifications of the perfect invite to also include those created on the computer. That said, even though I love creating my own custom party invitations, I made an exception when I saw this LEGO party invite. It was beyond perfect…and by perfect I mean creative and fun and already designed and ready to go!

I had seen these Lego “cake pops” on Pinterest, but having never made cake pops before, I wasn’t about to give it a first try with a semi-advanced cake pop… Then I came across this marshmallow cake pop tutorial From Living Locurto and thought they were much more my speed…and bonus, the marshmallows are already the shape of a minifig head! I actually simplified her version because it made more sense to me. Instead of cutting out the top bump of the minifig head using a cut-down full-sized marshmallow, I just bought mini marshmallows and cut them in half and stuck them to the top of a large marshmallow. It seemed pretty straight forward to me, so that’s what I did.

Before I used the LEGO Minifigure Ice Cube Tray for making party favors, I melted yellow candy melts and made these Minifig cupcake toppers. After I popped the candies out of the mold I used a food-safe marker and made faces. This wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be because the pens were designed to draw on royal icing and not candy melts which contain oil which coated the pen and prevented a nice even pen stroke. I made it work, but just be aware you will need to wipe off the marker tip often to get nice results.

So for all this work creating custom edible LEGOs, I have to put this out there. The kids at the party went crazy for these little touches, but their reaction once they tasted them was unexpected. I was ready to hear yummmm, these are so good, but instead the consensus was yuck, these are way too sweet. I was a little disappointed at first, but you can’t help love the honesty of a child. It’s not like kids don’t eat enough sugar at parties anyway, so for this reason, I was actually glad that the sugary treats were the least favorite. At least they looked cute!

Okay, now for the really fun part. One day when my boys were playing with their LEGOs I walked in, grabbed a pile and started building my own creations…a LEGO cupcake stand and a silverware caddy to be used for the party. Not only was it fun to build and make things with LEGOs, but my boys loved that I was hanging out with them doing their favorite thing!

I love how this turned out, the shutters of this little silverware caddy building open to reveal an old-school Minifig inside!

For activities at the party, the guests got to create their own LEGO shirt using special shirts I purchased on clearance at ThinkGeek.com. The shirts were a steal at $1.99 each and had an attached base plate on the front for sticking the LEGOs on. Although the shirts are no longer available, you can easily make your own by attaching these base plates with heavy-duty velcro. The velcro allows the LEGO creations to be removed when you need to wash the shirt.

Sometimes these candy LEGOs are easy to come by, other times, not so much. After searching in all the places I expected to find them without any luck, I turned to Amazon to the rescue. During the party the guests had to guess the number of candy LEGOs in the box in order to win it!