A Pirate’s Birthday | Charlottesville VA Child Photographer

We are all about Jake and the Neverland Pirates here in this household. So naturally, I wanted to do a pirate theme for Noah’s birthday. The only problem was that I had chosen to take a family trip to Disney World this year rather than throw him a party. I was a little bummed that I wasn’t going to get to do an elaborate party and then, a few nights before we were due to leave for our trip, I decided to do a mini party for his class. Last minute projects are how I do some of my best work after all!

I have quite a bit of fabric that I got from my grandmother and every now and then I have the perfect project for it. Since I just happened to have the perfect fabric to  make embroidered pirate bandanas on hand, I set to whipping those up. I really like how they came out and they were really simple to do. Total bonus.

Then I decided I wanted to do some sort of favor for the kids to take home. I found some pirate tattoos at Walmart that were $1 for about 36 tattoos. Then I bought some chocolate gold coins from CVS to add in. In an effort to keep the project simple, I found a printable treasure chest on Disney Junior and printed them out on cardstock. This is where things went a little off track. Cutting eight of those treasure chests out and then gluing all those tabs down was a little bit of a nightmare. It took me a really long time. Like maybe two hours. I was thanking my lucky stars that I wasn’t doing a full party and needing to make like 20 of them. But, they were really cute in the end and the kids went bonkers over them so it was worth it.

I also for sure wanted to do cupcakes. At first they were going to just be simple chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting. But, well, that’s just not my style. Try as I might. I was trolling pinterest and I saw some plastic little ships that someone had put onto their pirate cupcakes and of course I thought, I could make those! So it was off to Walmart to buy a little fondant. I could have made that myself as well but, remember, I’m trying to save time here and I’ve got less than 24 hours to complete the project. A girl has to compromise at times. The ships were fairly easy to make. I colored some fondant brown, made little white rectangle sails, and used a toothpick as the mast. Genius, I know. Try to contain yourselves.

All in all, I think the mini party was a success and the kids really seemed to enjoy it. Plus, Lucas got to come along and be an honorary member of the class, which he loves. Yay for mini parties!