it's a month of birthdays!

August is going to be a fun month. First, my oldest son celebrated his 9th birthday yesterday! ScrapMatters is celebrating their 3rd birthday this weekend (stay tuned for lots of fun stuff to come). I started designing at SM a year ago. Okay, technically I started in July of last year, but July was crazy busy, so we'll celebrate now! I love to organize and plan birthday parties for my kids, so I thought I would share a few ideas of themes, cakes, games, etc. this week.

One of my favorite parties I had for my son was a "Knight Party". I got the idea from Family Fun magazine.

To start we created "Royal Proclamation" invitations. We rolled them up and tied them with string before delivering them.

I made a fun dragon cake. The instructions for this cake can be found here.

For one of the games we held a "Ye Olde Knights Tournament" which was really just an obstacle course we set up in our backyard. I made castle turrets that were part of the obstacle course. For the party favor, my husband helped me make swords out of pool noodles. We handed these out before the Tournament, and kids were able to take them home at the end of the party. I made the stick horses out of a dowel, paper sacks, polyfill, and googly eyes. They worked great.

At the end of the tournament we handed out ribbons. This was a last-minute idea, but if I'd had more time I would have printed the center circle. It would have looked nicer, but 6-year-olds didn't care.

Here's an easy idea for a birthday banner. I created a 12x36 document in Photoshop and had it printed at Costco. Super quick and easy.

This party was tons of fun and my kids still talk about it 3 years later! Here's a page I made about it back in my paper-scrapbooking days.

I'll post some more birthday ideas if you want to check back later. Better yet, if you follow my blog (over to the right of the page) then you'll know when I update!

Also, don't forget to check out ScrapMatters this weekend for a great sale!