Taking two little boys to numerous birthday parties over the last few months, I realised how any party can easily be transformed from good to GREAT – all with the use of a trusty ink jet printer, and a variety of paper available from my local stationery store.
This year my son Ky turned five! For this landmark birthday he chose the theme Ninja Turtles. Is there a little Ninja Turtle out there who doesn’t like pizza? The food was sorted straight away!
Now, how to make the party look good.
I made some Ninja Turtle gingerbread cookies and iced them to look like little pizzas, but I wanted to go that small step further to give the little ones (and their parents) a WOW factor. Using my ink jet printer, some 6″ x 4″ photo paper, and the ninja turtle logo downloaded from the internet I printed the bottom half of each sheet of the photo paper. I put the cookies into clear lolly bags, then folded the printed photo paper over each bag, added a few staples and instantly changed a mundane cookie into something a little more exciting and professional
I did the same thing with the paper ninja stars, this time printing the paper in landscape mode.
The New York Sewer Lids were the next fun item. The kids used them for the party game of throwing the sewer lid into the toxic ooze (aka large round garbage bin). Once again using an image downloaded from the internet, I simply printed these onto plain paper and glued them to aluminium foil pie tins. The printed material triumphed once again, making the game so much more realistic.
The next challenge for my printer was the decorations. I wanted to create some bunting, so I printed some pictures onto plain A4 paper, cut them into triangles, and stapled the triangles to some ribbon. The result was better than expected, and I definitely will be using the technique again. No more buying bunting for me!!
The table at this point was looking pretty plain and in need of some more printer magic, so I set myself the task of creating a Ninja Turtle Juice label for the Pop-Drinks. I modified the logo using Photoshop, but you don’t really need to get that fancy, a simple turtle logo on a green background would do. I measured my juice bottle height and width, and used Microsoft Word to layout the labels. I did some test runs before loading sheets of sticker paper and printing the labels until I was satisfied with the result. I did however have to cut the labels down a little, as I didn’t want white borders. Using the sticker paper made it easy to apply the labels to the bottles. Still loving my printer!!
I also used the sticker paper to attach labels to noodle boxes of white, hand-made ninja stars and items such as stickers, glitter and pencils so the guests could decorate their own stars.
And just when you thought I had run out of ideas, I found one more use for my printer! I created ninja turtle eyes for the lolly bags. I found the template on the internet and printed the eyes onto sticker paper. These eyes needed to be cut out by hand, but the effort was well worth it as the lolly bags looked great!
My aim has been to show you “What’s a party without a printer?” It’s very easy to make something ordinary into something EXTRAORDINARY by using your home colour printer.
