Dinosaur Footprint Birthday Banner

When my little "Rowdy" dinosaur tuned one year old last January, I needed to create a splash for his party.  I put a lot of work into his brother's first birthday party and I wanted Rowdy to be able to look back and feel like I did a lot for him, too.  A central part of any birthday party is the "Happy Birthday" banner.  Keith and I created this amazing rainbow dinosaur footprint birthday banner for Rowdy's party and we wanted to share the free printable with you today.

Download the FREE Rainbow Dinosaur Footprint Birthday Banner PDF (via Google Drive) so you can add some fun rainbow footprints to your own party.  The PDF also includes some blank footprints in each of the 5 colors so you can add a name or change the message on the banner.

The FREE Rainbow Dinosaur Footprint Birthday Banner PDF

For Rowdy's party, we printed one footprint per page.  The banner took up a whole wall!  I taped each footprint individually to the crepe paper wall I had set up.  Alternatively, you could attach them to some string and then hang them on wall.  For a smaller banner, you can print the footprints 2/page.

I used a free Jurassic Park font for the letters.  I don't think that anyone noticed the font at the party, but I liked knowing that there was an additional dinosaur connection.  The letters themselves are very narrow and so we used 500 pt font to get them to fill the footprints nicely.

Slowly I'm getting through all of the DIY projects I did for Rowdy's birthday party.  (Very slowly, he is almost 20 months old!) I thought I was almost done but then I keep discovering more projects!  Make sure you check out my Dinosaur First Birthday Party Pinterest Board to see more of my inspiration.

More Dinosaur Party Crafts

When I was pregnant with Ryder, and planning Lucky's Halloween Housewarming Birthday Party, I decided that I was going to go big for my kids' first birthday party and after that I will do fewer DIY projects.  Lucky got a big second birthday party because I knew I could re-use Halloween decorations every year.  Plus, we moved back to Massachusetts so we were able to have a large party with a lot of our family.

In the run down to the final post on Rowdy's first birthday party, I wanted to share the other Dinosaur non-edible crafts I did for this party. (Check out my dinosaur themed party food!) Many of the projects got their own posts, but the ones here are simpler to execute.

Dinosaur Foot Tissue Box

Sometimes when I find a project I need to try it right away.  I knew that decorating a tissue box to be a dinosaur foot would be super fast and make people smile.  (Remember when I made pumpkin toilet paper roll covers?)

I covered a tissue box in two pieces of green construction paper.  The width of the paper was the exact length of the tissue box. I glued paper to the small ends and then the big ends.  I folded the pieces over the top and glued them down.

Next, I cut out 3 yellow triangles and glued them to the top of the box to make a dinosaur foot.  This is way cuter than I could have imagined!  Looking at the tissue box it made me think of a costume a kid could wear, which brought me into my next project.  

Foam Dinosaur Feet

How cut would it be to be to hand out dinosaur foot covers for the guests at the party?  Of course, it would depend on how durable the food covers were, but I wanted to give it a try.

You could freehand cutting out the dinosaur, but since I found a free printable template for the dinosaur foot I figured why not follow it?

The template itself was a little short for my feet, but it would probably work nicely for kids.  (I have big feet!) 

I elongated the shape and got nice foot coverage.  Unfortunately, the foam felt like it could rip at any moment.  I think I would try to find a way to incorporate these into my decor that doesn't involve wearing them.  Rowdy would rip these off of my feet and destroy them in about 45 seconds of me walking into a room.  

I made three different colors of feet and I rotated the toe nail color between them.  They were super fast and easy to make.  maybe if I made them out of a stiff felt they would have been sturdier to wear around a bunch of toddlers and preschoolers.  

Dinosaur Egg Favors

To share my DIY rainbow dinosaur crayons with our guests, I filled some clear Easter eggs with tissue paper confetti and place one dinosaur so it would be visible in each clear half.  I couldn't decide if I should include these in favor bags, have a decorate your own favor bag station and let kids fill them up, or if I should have these near the crafting area for kids to open up and use. 

It would have been nice to give each kid multiple crayons, but if I put more than one dinosaur inside the egg you couldn't really tell what was inside.  It is hard to photograph these favors because of the glare, but when you pick them up you can really see the little dino crayon peaking out.  

Hopefully no one will mistake these crayons for candy!

When I went to order plates and other party supplies, I realized that Oriental Trading company sold dinosaur crayons.  What was funny is that these crayons (which were solid colors) are the EXACT SAME SHAPE as the ones that I made myself.  Isn't that hilarious?  

 

Dinosaur Food Labels

I found some packages of flat wooden dinosaurs at Dollar Tree leading up to the party.  I got a few packages because I knew that I would find some way to incorporate them into the party decor. Why not use them as food labels?  I painted the wood pieces green and then wrote the different dinosaur party food names on them.

I wanted to make the labels stand up because it would look better for pictures.  I cut some paper straws into quarters and then glued part of the straw to the back of the dinosaur with a hot glue gun.  

I thought I might need to do something a bit more complicated to get these to stand up, but the simple straw post worked great.  I could have trimmed the top and bottom of the straws to make it look a bit cleaner, but this was super functional so I was happy.  

I think that I've finally made it through all of the major crafts and projects I did for Rowdy's first birthday party.  My final party project is to edit the pictures and write up a post for you!  (I haven't yet shared Rowdy's smash cake photoshoot, but that is a separate event from the party itself.)  Someday I'll be all caught up on my writing again, right?  

This post contains Amazon affiliate links but I was not paid to feature any specific product.  All product selections and thoughts are my own.  

Dinosaur Themed Food for a Dinosaur Birthday Party

Rowdy is now 18 months old.  Can you believe it?  I am still playing catch up when it comes to blog posts because, well, I'm home full time with an 18 month old.  It is hard to find the time to set down and write when Rowdy wants to sit in my lap, read books, or open and close Lego suitcases for 30 minutes straight.  In the Fall Rowdy will start preschool with Lucky so I should have some time to dedicate to writing and filming again.  Nevertheless, I'm happy to finally share some of the fun Dinosaur themed foods I created for Rowdy's first birthday party.

Fossil Cookies

I thought it would be fun to take sugar cookies up a notch and make some fossil cookies.  After a lot of experimentation, I settled on the following technique:

1. Make sugar cookie dough according to the package directions for shaped cookies (or use your favorite recipe from scratch)
2. Roll the dough out
3. Have a blast with your toddler making footprints on the dough and pressing imprints of the dinosaurs.
   
   
   
4. Cut the dough into cookie sized pieces with a knife.  I tried to to irregular shapes so it would look like cracks.
   
   
5. Bake according to your recipe directions.
   
   

If you want to make an imprint of the side of a dinosaur, make sure that you press it into the dough REALLY hard so it will show up after baking.

I spent a lot of time looking for dinosaur figurines that had different foot shapes, and then Lucky was gifted a Terra Container of Mini Dinosaurs for Christmas.  These were the perfect scale to fit many different footprint shapes into the dough.


Candy Dinosaur Nests

I love making chocolate covered crunchy snacks for parties.  Chocolate covered chow mein noodles have become spiders and crabs, chocolate covered pretzels have turned into pumpkins, so why not do something similar to make little dinosaur nests?  I happened to have a huge box of Rice Krispies on hand so I decided to mix these with some melted chocolate chips to create Dinosaur nests.  Ultimately I decided to add marshmallows the mix and create some Chocolate Rice Krispies Treats for the nests.  First, I used  my dinosaur candy mold and colored candy wafers to create some dinosaur shaped candy to sit on the nests.

I microwaved the wafers in a ziplock bag in 30 second increments until it was melted.  I mixed the colors together with my hands and then clipped off a corner to fill the molds.  I mixed yellow and dark green candy wafers to get a gradient of green dinos.  For the middle green I used a ratio of 7 green: 3 yellow.  I found that 40 melted wafers filled 9 of the dinosaur shapes.  For the yellow-green, I used 38 yellow and 12 green dinosaurs.  For the deepest green I used only dark green wafers.

I made the chocolate Rice Krispies Treats and then added balls to a greased muffin tin.  I made sure there was an indentation in the center to form a little cup for the "nest."   Then I added my candy dinosaurs to the center of each nest while they were still warm.  

The dinosaur candy melted just a little bit.  Not enough for the dinosaurs to lose their shape but enough to secure them to their chocolate nests.  These were DELICIOUS and super cute.

Baked Dinosaur Tortilla Chips

I've made my own pita chips before, but I've never tried to make my own tortilla chips. When I found this idea on Pinterest I knew it was a fun project that I could make in advance for Rowdy's party.  I used a Dinosaur sandwich cookie cutter to cut dinosaurs out of some Spinach, Garlic and pesto tortillas. Since I didn't have an oil spritzer, I brushed some olive oil on top of the cutouts and sprinkled them with coarse salt.  I baked the chips at 275 degrees F for 15 minutes.

I hand cut some triangles out of the excess tortillas.  I knew that I would want some small triangles to use to make some dinosaur dip!

There were a lot of extra pieces after cutting out the dinosaurs.  I turned these into chips, too and the boys had them as a crunchy, tasty snack.

Guacasaurus and Hummusaurus

I wish I could take credit for the Guacasaurus and Hummusaurus, but I found the inspiration for these fun dips in a blog post from a 4 year old's dinosaur birthday party.  This was also the inspiration for Rowdy's cake.)  

I used some of the triangle tortilla chips that I made above to create the spines and horns of these fun little creatures.  I forgot to get sour cream so I used some plain Greek yogurt to help make the eyes.  

Dinosaur Cakes

When Rowdy was an itty baby, I found that Wilton had some adorable dinosaur cupcake kits.  These came with legs and tails on the cupcake wrapper, edible sprinkle spines and the heads on toothpicks.

I made some funfetti cupcakes for these little dino cupcakes.  I was afraid that the legs and the tail wouldn't show up if I used chocolate.  

I think that if I were going to design these cupcakes myself, I might make a tail out of candy or something to make that more obvious.  After baking the cupcakes, the wrapper decorations were pretty subtle.

Triceratops Cake

I did a lot of research on my dinosaur party Pinterest page before settling on a cake design.  When I found this Triceratops cake tutorial I knew that it was something I could attempt to re-create myself.

I baked two round cakes plus an extra square cake in a Brownie pan.  Unlike the tutorial, I wanted to use cake for the dinosaur's crest on top of the head.  I cut the triangles such that the side attached to the head was from the edge of the pan.  This meant that the points were thicker and raised up a bit.  

I think it was really brilliant how the tail and the head are cut from one round cake.  (I forgot to take a picture of how they fit together.)  

Icing this cake was... hard.  I don't think I appreciated how hard it would be to frost cut pieces of cake without them falling apart.  I was able to "make it work" and I think that I ended up with a darling homemade cake for my little one.  

I didn't have a backup cake baked if this failed.  I think my backup would have been to quickly make a sheet cake and put my kid's name on it.  Look how cute this Triceratops came out, though!  

In addition to these fun dino themed foods I shared in this post, I turned a lot of other "normal" party foods into dinosaur foods.  I can't wait to show you the spread that I put out at the table!  

I just asked Lucky what kind of birthday party he wants this October.  Lucky has officially requested a Dinosaur themed birthday party, too!  We are gently suggesting other ideas, but I am happy that my kids have picked up my love for dinosaurs. We'll see if Lucky changes his mind as we get closer to October, but I might have to come back to these ideas.

This post contains Amazon affiliate links but I was not paid to feature any specific product.  All product selections and thoughts are my own.  

Dinoculars - A Craft Project for Multiple Kids

Rowdy turned one in January.  One year olds don't need a lot of planned activities at a birthday party, but his friends who are three and older would appreciate something to do.  I was on the hunt for a simple craft project that would require minimal supervision and then would be fun to play with at a dinosaur themed birthday party.

I have seen a few different dinoculars projects.  These involve decorating the tubes before gluing them together.  This would be great if you were working on the project with one kid, or if an adult wanted to make multiple, but a bunch of preschoolers and toddlers won't want to wait for glue to dry.  Therefore, I decided to take a different approach and glue the toilet paper tubes together BEFORE decorating them.  

The crafting station has:

1. Dinoculars bases - pre-glued toilet paper tubes (or cut in half paper towel tubes) with holes already punched
   
   
2. Pre-cut paper ready to decorate
3. Tape
4. Stickers (foam ones are best used after)
5. pre-cut ribbon for parents to tie to the ends.  ~2.5 ft
6. INSTRUCTIONS

I felt like this would be a simple craft project that kids could do with minimal supervision.  I hoped it would be self explanatory.  (Or at least easy enough to figure out what to do.)

DINOCULARS INSTRUCTIONS

1. Decorate Paper (save foam stickers for step #3)
2. Tape paper around pre-glued tubes
   
   
3. Add foam stickers (if desired)
4. Tie ribbon into holes
   
   
5. Search for Dinosaurs!!

When I created the instructions, I put Grandmama and Lucky to work to see if they could accomplish the project as written.

It was a success!  Lucky wanted to make some more straight away but I told him he needed to wait until Rowdy's birthday party.  

The dinoculars were a huge success!  it was wonderful to see kids having fun making them and then going around my house hunting for different dinosaurs!  

Lucky played with his long after the party.  I'm so glad I took the time to get this project ready for the party.  It was super easy to prep and the enjoyment was fantastic.  I also printed out some dinosaur coloring book pages for the kids to decorate.

Even Rowdy found the project very entertaining.  I wouldn't let him play with ones that had a ribbon, and he might have ripped off all of the stickers, but this is about as much enjoyment as a 12 month old can get out of a project!  

This wasn't just enjoyable for my human children, Indy really likes to chew on toilet paper rolls so he was very interested in this craft project.  

Don't worry, Indy.  I still have quite the stash of paper tubes.  I'll let you have some, too.