My older daughter is going to be turning four years old in a month and she has her heart set on a "pirate-mermaid-superhero party". It took a while to get our heads around what she meant, but I think we have is sussed now. I drew her a pirate-mermaid-superhero to go on her party invite and we printed out a few copies of the black and white line art for her and her little sister to colour in at home. Here's what a pirate-mermaid-superhero looks like...
So, first thing is first. We need some mermaid tails! I went to goodwill and picked up a gigantic pair of old sweat pants that looked to be a suitable green colour and a similarly gigantic gypsie skirt in lighter green with silver trimming all around it at three levels. I didn't think to take a pic of the garments before I made the first tail, so here they are with one leg and the bottom section of the skirt missing. You get the idea.
I sewed one level of the gypsie skirt to the end of the bottom half of a leg of the sweat pants and then threaded in some elastic for the waistband. I had some very very old and slightly congeled silver fabric paint that I painted the scales on with, but it seemed to work ok.
The kids really like it. The littlest one insisted on wearing it for most of Friday. I have enough material from the two garments to make four mermaid tails I think.
We did a craft a little while ago using plastic gallon milk jugs that I haven't blogged about yet (it's on it's way though), and we found ourselves with several left over jugs that friends had rescued from thier recycling for us. These, I thought, might make freaky looking Jack O lanterns.
We painted up four of them because I had two of my little girl's friends over at the time. The kids used orange acrylic paint, which I was worried might be a bit harder than the usual kiddy paint to clean up, but it was ok and in the end it was lucky that we did because it looks like trick or treating is going to be a bit rainy tonight.
Once the milk jugs were dry I cut a hole in the back by the handle for the treats to go in and gave the kids some white glue and a load of random bits of stuff we had around to turn thm into jack o lanterns. We had some green pipecleaners, some leaf shapes, I cut out from black eyes and mouths and some green tissue paper wrapped over the lids.
They look kind of cool with torches in them too. 
My girls used them this morning at thier preschool halloween parade and they are going to use them again tonight.
Yay! Beware of the aftermath though. You may need several wet wipes, or a cage and a hose. 
Each sword is two sheets of newspaper rolled up on the diagonal and folded over and taped to make the handle, then an oval of cardboard for the hilt and a couple of strips of cardboard wrapped around the bottom of the blade and taped to keep the hilt on. I had about half a can of white spray paint and a tiny amount of silver spray paint left over from another project, so I sprayed the swords with what was left to cover up the newsprint a bit. They weren't exactly silver, but none of the kids seemed to care. I decorated each of the hilts a little differently with a silver marker pen.
The kids had a whale of a time with the swords and no one was hurt at all at the party. Paul was somewhat picked on, but he's a big boy and at 32 I think he could handle it. I love the picture of him on the phone trying to give one of our mates directions to the park we were at, whilst fending off a hoard of pirate mermaid superheros!
I cut a hole in the plate, big enough that the cup lid would sit in it snugly, then tied the "winning string" onto the spoon hole of the lid, then threaded it around the plate and back through the spoon hole. All the other strings were taped loosly to the outside of the plate and fed through the spoon hole too, so that only the winning string would pull the plate out and leave a big hole in the bottom of the piniata for the presents to fall out of.
There is a Japanese store near us called Daiso and they sell many many different wooden model kits from cars to dinosaurs, to dolls house furniture and more. Each of these kits has loads of little pieces and although quite complex and fiddly, costs only $1.50 a pop.
This afternoon just one of these kits occupied four kids between the ages of two and four for around an hour. They diligently painted each tiny little piece all different colours with watercolour paints and then I fitted it together for them, to their delight. 
The kids painted the castle pieces first and then while they were drying we painted the base with brown and green and a nice blue moat to surround the castle.
Then everyone ate lunch and ran about like they were deranged while the base dried.
We glue gunned the castle pieces together and then the kids played with a load of toy animals and cars in the castle (I think we might have to have a project where we make knights and peasants and a king and queen to actually go in the castle, because as entertaining as it obviously was, driving cars around the moat and storming the castle with a giant polar bear is neither historically or geographically accurate.)
Each shoe was made by folding a piece of letter sized printer paper. My older daughter has got size 10.5 feet and we managed to make shoes for her just fine. Much bigger than a size 11 and you'll have to use newspaper or anything you can find larger than the letter size though.
It took 4 staples to secure each shoe. You could do it with three though if you had a decent stapler, rather than a teensy weensy cracker toy one that I've got. She had fun painting her slippers and then putting stickers on them when they were dry. I made sure that we put stickers over where the staples showed on the inside of the shoes, so they wouldn't scratch her.
Next we mixed up some kiddy paint that was watered down a little with a tiny bit of liquid dish soap added. Poured the paint on a sheet of aluminium foil and rolled the pins in it until they were coated evenly in paint.
When the little people papers were dry we decorated the people by adding hair and faces and clothes to them. We cut out our favourite ones and glued them to lollypop sticks to make cute little puppets.
