13461

Peter Pan Party - Refrigerator Box Boat

May 2006

Abbie in Charleston, SC

Honorable Mention

My daughter loves Tinkerbell, but since she is one of three girls in her class we decided that the theme needed to be expanded to Peter Pan to accommodate so many boys.

There are many options for Tinkerbell invitations, but I chose to order mine online from tcwdesigns.com and have them printed with wording that they had about fairies. I included some fairy dust in the envelope for added affect. 

I began searching for Peter Pan activities and ideas and got MANY ideas from this website. We decided to have the party at 2:00 in the afternoon so that we would just have cake and ice cream and some fairy food to nibble on. We made sugar cookies shaped like stars with pink frosting and sprinkles on sticks to look like wands, pretzel rods dipped in white chocolate and rolled in sprinkles, fruit salad (with grapes, apples, pineapple, and star shaped cantaloupe), chips and dip and fairy fizz to drink (punch with pop rocks for fizz). We could not find a Tinkerbell cake so I found a cake topper on EBay and had our local bakery decorate a cake with big sunflowers since the cake topper had Tinkerbell sitting on a sunflower.

When guests began to arrive they saw a sign on the front of the house that said, Gateway to Neverland, Second Star On the Right with an arrow pointing to the side gate. The path to the backyard was lined with paper flowers that I made with construction paper and glitter glue. I pained the cake dowels green to resemble stems on a flower. Two large foil stars were hung to represent the second star on the right.  My parents have a nice backyard so we chose to set up activity stations for the kids to play. We had pirate cove, mermaid lagoon, and Indian camp. I made a sign to label each area using butcher paper, markers, and stakes. 

Pirate Cove had three activities. First we buried treasure in the sand box and they had to dig for it. They got to keep whatever they found. Second, they could walk the plank on a board raised off the ground on bricks. Then, they could play in the S.S. Emily created out of a refrigerator box. Creating the ship took the longest time out of anything. I had seen other people say that they used a refrigerator box as a boat, but with no real explanation as to how they did it. 

So, here is how we did it. We laid the box on its side so that the top and bottom were accessible as sides.  The top was already cut open and the bottom had a cap type bottom that added support to the boat. We spray painted it brown and cut the side that was on top from the back near the capped bottom halfway down the sides of the box until it was cut completely off. We then used the part that was cut off and laid it on the ground and slightly overlapped the two pieces.  We then used hot glue to stick the two pieces together and folded the cut part up to make the front part of the boat. This is really hard to describe to other people, but it made a really cute boat. I also blew up black balloons that children could use as cannon balls. 

The second station, Indian camp, was basically a tipi made from 1x2 boards. We tied three boards together and spread an old brown sheet on top. We used bricks to hold the sheet in place and it really looked authentic. I ordered an inflatable totem pole ring toss game from EBay for an activity.

The final station was Mermaid Lagoon. We filled a pool with water and floated small bottles of bubbles, flowers, and inflatable fish. The children could reach in and get the bubbles to blow. They enjoyed sticking their arms in the pool just to cool off. I also had a table set up for decorating wands for the girls and treasure boxes for the boys. I ordered the treasure boxes from oriental trading company and made the wands myself. We used cake dowels and hot glued two foil stars from a party store. The stars had a hole in the top for hanging so I strung ribbon through them for decoration. We gave the kids glitter glue to add sparkle to their wands. The boys also used the glitter glue to decorate their treasure chests.

The tables that we used for guests to sit and eat were decorated with pink tablecloths and tulle around the umbrellas for a fairy affect. The tables had pink, orange, and green daisies on them as well. Each child was given a bag to take home with all of their treasures and a few more from the birthday girl. Everyone had a great time and I can't wait to plan another birthday party next year.

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