Updated: I’m offering my Lego Star Wars food labels for free to anyone who likes my facebook page!

Remember my Lego Star Wars invitations?  Well the party was GREAT, and I’m FINALLY blogging about it.  It was SO much fun and turned out just great.  I didn’t quite get everything done I wanted to (I never do it seems) but at some point you always have to stop and go with what you’ve got!

Because our children attend a charter school (for kids on the autistic spectrum) over 20 mins away we’ve had bad luck getting guests to show up to our house for parties.  A lot of their schoolmates live in the other direction and sometimes even farther away than us.  So we decided that having another party at our house would be futile, and so I picked a park right next to the school and set the party date and time for just after school got out on a Thursday.  We ended up with about half the class so it worked out great!

I had fun laying out the food and the table but then just as it was time to take pictures the sun peeked out over the gap in the pavilion and lite up the table just WRONG!  So the pictures are all full of bright red reflections from the tablecloth, and shadows and bright lights.  No matter what I do I just can’t get good pictures to save my life of my pictures!  GAH!  Someday I’ll get it all right!

My favorite part of the overall decor was my Lego block carbonite Hans Solo!  No one else at the party was nerdy enough to appreciate it fully.  I cut it out of vinyl with my new Silhouette machine.  And I love love LOVED it!  And the first of my themed food…  Leia Rolls!  I opted not to put the frosting on the cinnamon rolls so you could see the roll design, I didn’t want to cover up what made them look like Leia’s hair!  On to the rest of the food!

You can also see my table layout.  Again, I’m still figuring out how to best get amazing, and pretty, party layouts.  Clearly I need to play with more height next time!  In fact I cut out the backdrop and the pendant banner I made because they just looked TERRIBLE!  Super high, with all this space between the table/food and them…  Bad bad BAD!

I had SO much fun coming up with food that fit the theme of our party!  Pixie sticks for Light Sabers was the obvious choice (that or candy dipped pretzels) but did you know that they are SUPER hard to find these days?  I went to 7 different stores!  SEVEN!  I choose to go with pixie sticks for speed, in the end it might’ve been faster to dip all the pretzel sticks in chocolate!  And Chocolate candy rocks for Space rocks!  All the images for the labels are from screen shots of the various Lego Star Wars games!  Some where harder to find good pictures of than others, so making the labels took DAYS longer than I thought it would.

The favorite food of the adults by FAR was my white chocolate Padme Popcorn!  Good thing I made a HUGE batch of it!  My favorite title is my Wookie Balls (get it?  No?  Well it’s funny…)!  Here is one of the area’s I ended up falling short.  My PLAN was to make homemade hostess coconut covered Snowballs , but in brown of course (get it?  Big brown coconut covered balls?  GET IT???).  I ended up just getting donuts holes, fast and easy, but not quite a fun.

MY favorite food to EAT was the Hoth Pops (if your not a big geek like me it’s the Snow covered planet!)!  I have to admit I’m not a cake ball fan (shhh don’t tell anyone) but I DO love oreo balls, so that’s what I made!  I covered them in white chocolate and, not that you can see them, edible sparkles (I was SO glad there was leftovers, I made about 50 and I probably ate HALF of them)!   Then I used chocolate gold coins for my Boba Fett Bounty!

I used Nerds candy for Space Dust, I kind of wished I could’ve found something less colorful, but they are the perfect size and so fun to eat!  And Sour Patch Kids for my Edible Ewoks.  These were the kids favorites.  I have a picture of one little boy with a plate FULL of these, about 1/2 an inch THICK.  And it wasn’t his first plateful!

I LOVED the Yoda Soda, it’s sprite and lime sherbert mixed together.  It is SUCH a lovely color, and I have to say it tasted pretty darn good.  One of my favorite parts of the party prep was my C-3PO H2O.  I had this idea to spray paint the water bottles Gold.  My husband said it wouldn’t work, but I had high hopes.  They turned out LOVELY!  Just lovely!  I am SO in love with these.  I think I’ll have more spray painted water bottles in the future!  They worked great, and of course when you take the lid off you have nice non-painted plastic for drinking.  My kids LOVED drinking the special GOLD water.  But my oldest did tell me I should have named it C-3PO oil, because he wouldn’t drink water- silly me!

And the centerpiece my Lego Millennium Falcon!  I kind of wish I’d had another hour to spend on this, but I always feel that way when it comes to my cakes.  They are NEVER good enough for me and my vision, but it’s recognizable, cute and the birthday boy loved it.  THAT’S what really matters in the end.  And of course it tasted GREAT!  He picked Strawberry, I am SO glad I finally have an AMAZING strawberry cake recipe.  It’s taken years, but I’m really in love with it now!

And the back of the cake…  The park was sunny and warm but we did have a wind come whipping through the pavilion where we were set up and I didn’t think we’d be able to pull off candles.  But with the help of my dad holding his jacket on one side and someone else holding a plate on the other we were able to get the candles to work JUST long enough for him to blow them out!

When you think six high functioning autistic kindergartners at a party you automatically think “how am I going to keep them occupied?”.  I knew by having the party at the park that would keep them occupied for a few mins, but these boys don’t have a long attention span.  SO I came up with some fun hands on crafts.

The first, and by FAR the most popular was decorating their own light sabers.  I went to my FAVORITE store (Home Depot) and bought some 9 ft long foam pipe covers.  I cut them down to 3 ft each and then covered the bottom 6 inches with some SHINY silver Duct Tape (not the brand duct tape, but tape for ducts…  Then I had Duct tape (the brand) in 4 different bright colors (red, yellow, green and blue) for the boys to decorate their own light sabers with!  At the beginning everyone went with one color, but after my dad created his own multi-colored light saber it was all the rage.  We soon had stripes, spirals, etc…

I used my Silhouette to create Lego Star Wars Temporary Tattoos for all the kids!  love love LOVE them!  The kids did too!  My son has been using up the extras over the last 2 weeks.  I’m down to my last 3, and I’m pretty sure I’ll have to make more once they are officially gone!

For a sit down craft, for the quieter attendee’s, I had Galaxy Play dough.  I found it on Pinterest a few weeks ago (LOVE that site) and thought it would be PERFECT!  I made homemade BLACK play dough (salt) and bought a ton of different colored glitter.  Then I let each child have a handful of the play dough and picking their own glitter colors (or some of EVERY color) they got to knead the glitter into the dough!  Then I had containers for them to take their new, shiny, galaxy play dough home with!

And of course it wouldn’t be one of my kids birthday’s without a homemade pinata.  I made a death star pinata!  Using a punch ball to get the perfectly round shape, and after a few layers cutting out a circle, filling the pinata, and putting the circle BACK on, but inverted I created a Death Star.  My mistake with this one?  I sprayed it with metallic silver paint and then when I went to draw a bunch of black detailed lines onto it with my sharpie it wouldn’t write!  GRRRRR!  It was so shiny and glossy the pen wouldn’t work on it!  So it was a pretty bland/plain pinata.  I should’ve gone with a matte grey…  NEXT TIME!

A HUGE treat for my sweet birthday boy is that his kindergarten teacher came too.  She is just amazing, I can’t sing her praises enough.  She had a class of 13 autistic boys all year (and it’s all day kindergarten) and she was absolutely incredible!  I love that she was right there playing light sabers with the boys the whole party.  I wish she was moving up every year with my sweet little boy, but alas, I have to leave her for the future kindergartners to love!  I can count on one hand the number of people that TRULY “get” and love my son, and she is one of them.

So a totally fun and successful party!  My parents ended up being in town and my sister and her family came too, so we had a great turnout, plenty of food and craft supplies and everyone had a great time.  Success!