How to plan a Star Wars party part 1

Birthdays are not a big deal in Japan and you don't get all the fancy party goods that you can get back home so if you want fancy goods you have to get a bit creative or dig deep into those pockets and order through the internet!

I thought I would share how I put the party together, I did a little at a time over the course of a few weeks and got Ebi-kun involved as much as possible. Now, although I did this for a Star Wars theme you can easily adapt most of it to any theme you like.

First up, decide on a theme.

Next get onto google images, I put in Star Wars and then used various characters names and had the image setting to high so I knew the quality would be OK for printing. I am on a mac so I basically dragged any image that I liked onto my desktop.

With something like Star Wars it is virtually impossible to trace an image back to it's original source to ask permission to use it but if you are wanting to use an individual artists work then you really should contact them about using their images. I am going to share how I prepared everything for our party but not the actual printables since I do not own any of the images.

What I will share with you is how to make...

• Cups
• Food labels/tags
• Yoda soda
• Light sabers
• Death Star piñata
• Sandpeople senbei
• Death Star watermelon
• Treasure hunt
• Goodie bag toppers
• Fridge magnets
• Mini colouring books (& resources)
• Yoda Birthday Cake

That would be one looooong post so I will break it up and do a bit at a time and then bundle it into an ebook at the end, how does that sound?

CUPS

what you need:

white sticker sheets for the printer

printer

images you have collected

scissors

plain cups

Use whichever software you have or there is software online that you can use, I used Photoshop. Crop your images so that they are about 5cm x 5cm and place them on the pace in a grid fashion (easier to cut that way). Print them out, cut out and stick onto your cups. I made ours all different so that everyone knew which cup was theirs plus it was fun to see which character you would get when you took a cup.

You can also use the same sheet to make stickers for the goodie bag or to decorate thank you notes etc.

Yoda Soda

what you need:

printer paper and printer

image

soda (pop) or juice, whatever the drink it you are using

ruler

scissors

The easiest thing to do it remove the existing label from the bottle then measure it, make sure that there is an overlap on the length to make it easier to glue onto the bottle. Using which ever software you are comfortable with, make a rectangle, mine was 10cm x 27cm.

In the centre of the rectangle add an image and some text. If you want to get fancy you can also add imaginary ingredients (if you have guests with allergies then listing what is written on the ordinal label is probably a good idea) and a bar code. Print, cut and stick to the bottle.

Food labels

what you need:

printer friendly card

images

scissors

One way to make the food more fun is to give it fancy or funny names, we tend to have pot luck parties so I had no idea what most people were bringing. I designed some blank labels and then as the food arrived I gave it a Star Wars themed name such as 'The Dark Side Pizza' and 'Han Solo & Cheese Sandwiches'. For the labels themselves I made a new grid, each rectangle was 5cm x 10cm and I placed one of the Star Wars pictures on each rectangle, leaving space to write in the food name afterwards. Of course you could use these for name tags or present tags too.

OK, next up will be the light sabers...