Oh gosh! I had such fun with this theme! At first when James said he wanted an under water theme, I thought it might be a little too ‘baby’ for him, seeing that he was now turning five already… But it turned out pretty cool, I must say. There is so much one can do with this theme!
As always I used Pinterest to get most of my ideas from, and the first thing that caught my eye was a DIY Treasure chest! And James LOVES treasure chests! He likes putting scavenged jewelry into small boxes and calling it his treasure :) So first thing I made was the treasure chest, out of an old diaper box. Unfortunately I didn’t take any pics while I was making it because I was too excited and forgot all about taking photos! I used this tutorial.
I bought small little wooden treasure chests, to put inside the big one, for the kids to decorate themselves. I think they quite enjoyed that!
To go with the treasure chest, I made huge paper jewels, to look like some treasure fell out. I wanted to make lots of coral too, for a coral reef, but ran out of time. I managed to make a couple though. The white faux coral was made out of some wire and paper maché (tutorial here) and the blue and orange coral was made using expanding foam and some pipe cleaners (tutorial for that here).
The other activities we had were Sand Art tables, some water balloon launching (unfortunately I didn’t get any pics of this in action) and some water beads or water crystals with hidden sea creatures. The water beads ended up being used as bombs and everyone got hit at least a couple of times. The kids really enjoyed it! And instead of using the water balloons to shoot the target with the launcher, they ended up bombing the grownups!
For the decorations I also made seaweed out of plastic table cloth and jellyfish with Chinese lanterns. I used this tutorial for the seaweed.
I wanted to give the kids something different for party hats and found some images of crab paper crowns. So I made these from card stock, googly eyes and pipe cleaners.
To make the snack table fit in with the theme I made a table wavy cloth with disposable plastic table cloths. Finding different shades of blue proved to be quite a challenge! Just glad I found some :)
When it comes to the snacks, I have to mention Tihmily Cakes. They made the cupcakes, oyster cookies and marshmallow pops for us. And what an amazing job!!! Everything was sooo yummy! I think I’m addicted to those oyster cookies, because I could not stop eating them!
And that’s about it! Last but not least, a couple of pics of some of the friends having fun :)
SugarQube 