Pirate Birthday Party

Yo Ho Ho! We had a fabulous pirate birthday party for our little pirate Lincoln, 2 weeks ago. He has been obsessed in LOVE with all things “pirates” since right before his birthday last year and so I knew we had to give him an extra special pirate themed birthday party this year!

Pirate Vocabulary
Pirate Party Printables – didn’t have time to use them, but great ideas and free printables
Fun Games
Tip Junkie’s blog list of Pirate Birthday Ideas
Frugal Creative Pirate Party Ideas– wonderful ideas

I haven’t ever sent out “real” invitaions for my kids parties. In this technology age, I have found it best to use evites or electronic invitations and have had a great response because I am able to see who is coming, who can’t, and who I need to contact if they haven’t opened the evite. You can use this free website for any invitation for any kind of occasion.

This is the design I choose

On the evite you are able to put all the normal info (who, what, where, when, etc.) you would put on a regular invitation but also add pictures if you would like to. Then you can add extra wording that would be under the design that you would see when you scroll down when on the website. Here invitation wording I came up with:

Decorations
We had a lot of pirate stuff already so I used a lot of it to bring the party alive. I bought the table clothes at Walmart, some decor from the dollar store, some stuff from a party store including a treasure chest pinata and balloons. We didn’t go all out but I think it turned out awesome!

Food
I did have a frugal budget in mind when thinking about what I wanted to serve at this party and since my kids still need naps, especially my 2 year old, the party had to be either before nap or after so it’s either lunch time or close to dinner so we had to have a meal.

I decided on that I would provide most of the meal and invite guest to bring a side dish but they weren’t required to do so. I made name tags for the food with creative pirate lingo titles.

enjoying the rotten fruit skewers

Craft
The craft was used in conjunction with the the main activity which was a treasure hunt, which was a lot of fun. When kids arrived they received a brown bag with a treasure map and stickers.They were able to decorate the map with glitter glue pens and markers and stickers. There was also a tattoo station set up where they could choose to get one.

Activities
The treasure hunt was the main activity. I placed 5 golden star balloons with a “clue” as a marker at each station. Once they reached the clue then moved to the next station and so on.

• station 1: the house
• station 2: the stop sign
• station 3: the parrot
• station 4: the tree
• station 5: the treasure (X marks the spot)

All of the kids, especially the 4 year olds and older REALLY enjoyed the treasure hunt. They were really on the mission to find the treasure. And a couple of adults told me I did that hunt on purpose for some exercise as the party, kiddingly. LOL!

All of the kids got their own treasure box (their favors) at the last station which was a treasure box pinata. I had good intentions of using the pinata for it’s purpose but we ran out of time. The favors were filled with bubbles, an eye patch, a ring earring, rolo’s and golden coins. After kids got their treasure, they all put their eye patches on and we took some snapshots.

Arrg Matey!

The Cake
I knew we had to have a VERY special cake. I also knew I wanted it to be homemade to reduce a lot of additives, artificial food colorings, etc. so I searched google a couple of times for pirate ship birthday cakes. There were several, some elaborate and some that were ok. I found one on the Piece of Cake: Pirate Birthday Party blog post which also had some great party ideas. She had a section on the cake with step by step photo instructions.

I followed them mostly but only made on 9X13 pan and a mini loaf pan. I used recipe shared from my friend Christina for Southern Heirloom Cake (I used natural/organic ingredients in place of the ones listed). I made & baked the cake (my first time making a truly homemade cake which takes A LOT of time and effort but very worth it) and then cut it into appropriate shapes & sizes, wrapped in saran wrap and froze.

The next day, my friend came over and helped shape the cake into a pirate ship using a homemade chocolate frosting recipe. She told me a Marshmallow Fondant recipe to make before she left and I used cocoa powder and natural food coloring to make yellow and blue fondant.

I used Lincoln’s pirate toys to decorate the cake

Yummy Cake!

sorry so blurry

the”pirate ship”

Well, we had a great time, I hope you can get inspired by some of these ideas! How do you plan a child’s birthday party?

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