Spot Birthday Party

Little Miss Alex is quite fond of Eric Hill's Spot books (she has 16 of them at last count, two of which are mine from when I was little..!).  One of her favourites is Spot Bakes a Cake and she always says "wow!" when the cake is revealed, so a plan was hatched to make her birthday party Spot themed. Here's a wee look-see at what we did.

First, the invitations.  I downloaded some Spot placemats from this website, and through the magic of Photoshop, drew an Alex into the picture and added the party details (duh).

For the envelopes I got some coloured A4 paper and used these instructions to fold them up.  I also printed off some return address labels with Spot on them.

I drew four pages from Spot's Birthday Party, painted them all pretty-like and stuck them to the wall at toddler height along with the accompanying text from the story:

Alex and Spot checking them out

 Nev bought 10 helium balloons in bright colours (just like Spot's balloons at his party), and brought them home with him on the train.  What a good Dad!

We cleared out the lounge and set up a ball pit (do you have any idea how much mess a bunch of kids with 300 balls can make??) and colouring table with some of Alex's favourite characters and stickers.

The table had a table cloth just like Spot, dog bone shaped bowls for the chips and little metal dog bowls full of Pebbles and Jelly Beans.  There were dog bone shaped biscuits and because Elmo is her best friend at the moment, we had to make Elmo cupcakes too.

Ready and waiting with Elmo and Spot

 And then there was the cake.  Just a round chocolate cake, with pebbles stuck around the side, blobs of yellow icing with jaffas on top, sherbert rope things (Spot used icing in the book, but I wasn't about to pipe icing that thick all over the cake!), and four of the dog bone biscuits dipped in white chocolate.

Nev's Mum pointed out that Spot baked the cake for his dad, and it's Nev's birthday next Saturday so I might have to repeat the process with an Alex assistant.  We'll see...!

Other neat things I found online and copied were fruit (melons, pineapple) cut with cookie cutters into stars/hearts and cheerios cut so they look like octopuses when cooked.  And This is where I found the candles and paper plates etc.