pokemon

Pokemon Party on a Budget

Pokemon Party on a Budget: My son just turned 3 and wanted a Pokemon Party. We are on a tight budget so we had to keep costs down. Due to the release of Pokemon Go it is hard to locate Pokemon party supplies at least where we live so we got creative. We needed 3 cheap things to make the party successful: venue, cake, and party favors.

Venue: For our venue we chose to go to our son’s favorite park/playground. It was free, we brought a folding table and some lawn chairs. We could have held it at our house but the tree in our yard seems to be home to millions of mosquitoes and the playground seemed more fun. Free is always good and all of his friends love the playground too.

Cake: For our cake we chose to make our own cupcakes and decorate them to look like pokeballs. We bought two boxed cake mixes: one funfetti, and one devil’s food. We bought two containers of white icing: cream cheese, and buttercream. Then a red and a chocolate icing that had included piping tips. We could have made the red and “black or chocolate” icings with food coloring but we were lazy. The cake mixes produced 40 cupcakes total. We iced each completely with white icing, then added the line and circle with chocolate then filled in half of the circle with red icing. We rushed the process so it looked a little sloppy but he thought they were amazing and they tasted great. Now we could have melted candy and made it nice and smooth or we could have used fondant but again we are lazy. Our finished product looked like this:
pokeball cupcakes

Party Favors: For our party favors we decided to create our own pokeballs so that each guest could have a few to play with and take home. To create them we used ping pong balls because they are light and don’t hurt when bounced off your head and don’t break items in the living room when bounced off the shelves and such. This was a trial and error process. First I tried coloring them in with Sharpie markers. I don’t know whether we bought faulty markers or the marker just didn’t like the material the balls were made out of but either way they did not look good. The marker seemed dried out and the ball looked streaky and it just wasn’t appealing so we went to plan B. We put duck tape around half of the ball leaving half exposed. We used the excess tape as a stand to hold up the balls so that we could spray paint them red.We placed them in a box prior to painting.
spraypaint pokeballs
We put two coats of paint on. Once dried we took out a bottle of black acrylic paint and hand painted the line and circle on each one. This did take some time.
handpaint pokeballs
Once the paint was fully dry they looked awesome. Again we kind of rushed and each one looked different than the next but the kids loved them.
finished pokeball
The kids ran around the playground pretending to catch each other. My son throws them all over the house and at his stuffed pokemon to catch them. They took a while to make but were a huge hit. A few kids tried stuffing their pockets with extras that they found laying around.

Stuff we used:

We kept the party simple and had our pokemon party on a budget and it was a great success. You don’t need to spend a fortune on a party. Our son had a fantastic day and so did our guests. I’d love to hear about some of your DIY parties and what themes you came up with, feel free to comment with ideas that may help others do a budget friendly party.

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