I originally cut 18 to 22 minions for our school's teacher appreciation week with a "You're One in a Minion" theme. Since a dozen or so minions were leftover after that week, I used them on the invitations for my daughter's party with the text: "Assemble the minions! You are invited to a despicable party for {name}'s {year}th birthday." It included the address, date and time. I used the Dalek free font from dafont.com because it looked industrial Gru-ish to me.
At the party, the guests first decorated a yellow gift bag to look like a minion. I found a free download of a pin the goggles on the minion game HERE at Hale Grafx, a great resource for many fun free printables, so I printed extra sets of goggles to stick on the bags for the minion faces. For the gift bags, we just used blue construction paper for the overalls and a fine point black sharpie to draw the mouths, hair and detailing on the overalls. The gift bags doubled as the party favor bags, so that guests could keep adding things to the inside of the bags as we went along. It was a great gathering activity since not all party guests arrive at the same time.
The goggles on the water bottles came from Target. They are called Beer Keepers (or something like that). They came in packs of 6 or 8. I found them in the party aisle along with other unique party favors and gag gifts. Each guest took home a water bottle minion.
We had banana shaped hard candies (like Runts) which I ordered online from amazon before the party. Minions go crazy for bananas, you know.
For our next activity, my daughter wanted to paint fingernails, so I ordered a 24 pack of assorted Shany brand nail polish bottles from Amazon before the party. Each guest chose two bottles to keep. While their nails dried, we watched a minion short cartoon from a $5 Walmart DVD bin.
While we set up for the minion shaped pinata (also found at Walmart), the kids played pin the goggles on the minion game from Hale Grafx. For prizes, they got a twinkie decorated to look like a minion. (That's another idea I found online through pinterest and google searching. I love the internet!) They also got candy and small plastic toys from the pinata.
The birthday cake was just a simple double layer lemon cake from a cake mix with a raspberry/blueberry filling. I used yellow frosting for most of the cake, black frosting in a grocery store tube for the hair and glasses, white frosting for the eyes, and small circles cut from graham crackers for the irises. Nothing fancy, but it tasted great! After cake and banana splits, we opened gifts. Then guests could choose to either make the elastic band bracelets on plastic looms or to play outside. We had a lot of silly fun!
While decorating for the party, I needed to hang some minion party streamers from Zurcher's on our vaulted ceiling. The thought came to mind to use a ladder, but I had a swollen, painful knee due to arthritis, and didn't want to haul a heavy ladder into our house from the garage. I decided to climb onto the back of the couch to reach the ceiling instead. That worked just fine until I had a moment of stupidity when I decided to jump onto our wood floor from the back of the couch. I couldn't stick the landing because my swollen knee buckled from the pressure of the jump, and landed on my tailbone on our hard tile floor. Ouch!
I spent the entire party on my feet because I couldn't sit at all without extreme agony. At least my tailbone hurt so much that I could no longer feel the pain from my swollen knee. Those injuries led to even more injuries in the days that followed. It took three weeks before I could sit without pain.
The back of each decorated Twinkie had a little computer printed tag I made with the Dalek font again, which said "Thanks for coming to my party! You're one in a minion!" I also gave a few of the extra minion Twinkies out on Mother's Day with a tag saying "Happy Mother's Day! You're One in a Minion!"
I'll share more about May's Mayhem in the next post! Mother's Day was great!
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