Ninjago Party

Ryan's 6th Birthday - Ninjago Party

My son really wanted a Ninjago party for his 6th birthday.   I don't think they sell Ninjago party supplies yet so we made our own.  Lego.com has posters of all of the characters to download that we used to make a sign and some other decorations.  He wanted to make the invitations himself so I let him draw a picture of the 4 ninjas.  I searched online for a few ninja fonts and added the information to his picture.  I scanned them and printed them on cards.  He was so proud of them.  They also had our address and rsvp on the bottom which I removed before posting this picture. 

I made all the kids ninja headbands with what I hope was their names on them.  I searched for websites that will translate your name into Japanese.  I have no way of knowing if they were correct, but the kids loved them.  I made the headbands out of white broadcloth.  I used the entire width of the fabric so that I didn't have to sew the ends.  I started with 6 inch strips of the broadcloth.  I folded them in half and sewed them into long tubes.  I flipped them right side out and ironed them flat.  The finished headbands were about 2.5 inches wide and 45 inches long.  I printed out the names and cut them out.  I slid the paper inside the tube of fabric the traced them onto the fabric with fabric markers.  The boys had a red circle in the center, their name on one side and the symbol for ninja on the other.  The girls had their name in the center and some branches and flowers I drew around them.  I was really glad that they all decided to wear them.  

We also had swords for all the kids that I got in the dollar spot at Target.  We got lucky there.  We blew up lots of balloons and had the kids try to keep them in the air with the swords.  I found some great instructions to make oragami throwing stars at origami-instructions.com.  I made about 40 of them in lots of bright colors, and the kids tried to throw them into a bucket.   We also got these great chopsticks for the kids to eat with and then take home from Amazon.com.  

 Because all of the favors were being used during the party I decided to make the favor bags a craft.  I used yellow duct tape and some paint pens to make the faces on white gift bags.  I set them out with some crayons and let the kids create their own ninja gift bags. 

I also made some ninja sugar cookies to give out as favors.

Here is what the favors looked like all together.

For the food we had potstickers, mini spring rolls, grilled chicken on a stick and a really good Asian Noodle Salad that I found on thepioneerwoman.com.

I found some really good ideas on Life, Right Now for candy sushi and dipped fortune cookies.  I thought they came out really cute.

I always have some sort of fruit tray at my parties, but I wanted it to be the color of the Ninjago ninjas... white, black, blue and red.  I couldn't come up with anything white so I added some mini marshmallows to my tray of blackberries, blueberries and strawberries.

We had ninja cupcakes and a Sensei Wu cake.

 I had planned to make a ninja head cake, but at the last minute my son wanted the Sensei Wu.  I have only made a few cakes with fondant and kind of make it up as I go.  I could really use some lessons on the proper way to do it.  It took about 8 tries before I came up with a way to make the hat.   I rolled out the fondant in a big circle.  I cut the circle like a pizza into 8 triangles.  I laid each triangle on the edge of the one next to it and formed the hat.  I had to put tall cups all the way around the cup to make the brim of the hat flare out while the fondant dried.  It was the only thing I had that was the right height.  It was a lot of work, but my son was so excited when he saw it.  He said it was perfect and way better than he expected!

The party was so much fun.