Pokemon Party!

We recently celebrated H's 6th birthday. Between our trip to New Orleans and just plain recovering from the holidays, I started the prep super early. I'm glad I did as the week before the party was unusually busy and cedar allergies took me out a few days this season.

I painted this Pikachu plywood game board and the kids tried to “catch” him with the styrofoam pokeballs.

H had asked for a Pokemon party for several months, so i had a while to brainstorm. I don't usually care for just throwing some themed plates and napkins at a party and since Pokemon is either played via the trading card game (excluding kids that aren't into that) or PokemonGo (virtually and only on phones) I struggled on how to bring Pokemon to life. Eventually I came up with kid carnival games where they could interact with some of the franchise's well-known characters. 

I painted a "ball toss" board with Pikachu on it. And used inexpensive Styrofoam balls from the craft store as the pokeballs. It took one hour in front of the tv to paint 12 of them like pokeballs using plain ole acrylic paint which I had either lying around or leftover from painting Pikachu on the board. At the last minute my husband taped some Christmas lights to the outside of the board and plugged it into an outlet that we have on remote. Everytime the kids would get a ball through he'd hit the remote and the lights would light up.

Next I asked my sister to help me simplify Charmander to an image I could piece it together out of felt. This one was fairly easy once I figured out the dimensions. I made felt "flames" to go on the board and created a "Pin the tail on Charmander" game. For the background I simply wrapped a large piece of scrap board we had in the garage with two yards of white felt. 

And lastly, I had a poster of Magikarp printed up and laminated (I laminated in case the weather was bad - you could easily skip this expense). This poster we hung on an old blue table cloth from my backdrop stand. These are fairly inexpensive on Amazon and I have one that we use for the shop. You could easily string it up between two chairs using twine as well. 

My final piece was the giant Pokeball pinata. Pinata pro-tips: take your time, use real crepe paper, not tissue paper and settle in with a nice Netflix binge because it’s not a quick project. Geez louise did it take awhile to wrap that sucker. And it did hurt just a bit when the kids ripped it to shreds. But only for a second because they had so. much. fun. 

We also got all the kids "Ash Ketchem" pokemon trainer hats. I ordered some $1.50 hats and drew on the symbol with fabric marker. 

I was pretty thrilled to see how much H loved everything. And happy that he's at an age where he notices all the little details!