Legend of Zelda Party 2016

I can't believe my baby just turned 11. Next year he'll be in middle school and I don't know how many more parties he'll want me to plan then.  This may be the last. So here it is:

ZELDA

For once I knew the characters and the setting because I have played the Twilight Princess version on the Wii. It reminds me of King's Quest and I loved King's Quest. As usual, I have to thank Pinterest users for their great boards.

About a month before the party I ordered character plates, black placemats, themed tattoos/stickers, and Zelda napkins online from Birthday Express and Hylian shield mint tins from retrobit games.  But then we all got really busy and before we knew it, 2 weeks had past. So, 2 weeks before the party I decided I didn't have time to make invitations and I ordered digital invitations from an Etsy shop.  In 2 days, I had the file and I took it to Office Depot to be printed. We handed them out one week before the party...very last minute.

This is the picture on the Etsy page
for the invitation we ordered.
 Purchased from Smallfrynotables

At office depot, I also had images of Zelda stained glass windows printed onto overhead sheets to make window clings for decorations. The images I used are on my pinterest Zelda party board. It worked out great. Unfortunately the last transparency melted in their printer and they had to call in a repair man. I didn't need that last print but I felt bad about their machine. Apparently when the machine heats up it can melt the overheads. The melted copy looked like a 3D shrinky dink. Hmmm, I wonder if I can turn the window clings into Shrinky Dinks now?

After handing out the invitations, we got to work making favor crayon rupees. First my daughter carved a soap rupee. Then we made three silicone molds by taking casts of the soap rupee. Then we sorted old crayons into colors and melted them at 325 degrees for about 7 minutes.  We added white to the blue and purple sometimes to make them lighter. These turned out great. Every guest got to take five home.  The molds started to tear after a while but they were easily patched. We are planning to make Zelda soap using the molds next. They are also food safe so we thought about making smaller ones and melting jolly ranchers but we ran out of time.

Then we made a Triforce piñata. That was fun. I used a crown royal box because the dimensions looked perfect. Two sides of the box were the exact length and width required and I trimmed the front side down to make the third side of the triangle. Then I used blue tape to make the back of the piñata and hold the triangle shape. I placed typing paper scraps over the tape on the inside of the piñata so the candy wouldn't stick. My husband cut out a triangle from another cardboard box to make the front. After the candy was loaded and the front taped on with packing tape, we used glue sticks to adhere small strips of white and yellow tissue paper onto the triangle. Voila. Triforce piñata.

We had a quest to find swords, boomerangs, pieces of heart, poe souls and fairies. The first clue was, "Buried beneath a pile of rocks beside the abyss, it is dangerous to go alone, take this!" In a gray bag under splat rocks by the pool, the children found swords. They battled briefly with swords but had more fun with the splat rocks. I originally bought these thinking they were sponges we could use with slingshots for target practice but they turned out to be water filled squishy things and they were too sticky and heavy for the slingshots I had.

The next clue was, "In a castle set apart, there you will find a piece of heart." In the Little Tikes castle they found treasure boxes with heart ring pops. The next clue revealed the location of the boomerangs - behind scrap wood in a planter with a ficus tree that has a bemustached trunk. "Concealed within an ancient wood, lies the loyal companion of good, if you dare to seek it out, discreetly approach the Deku sprout."

We made poe souls for the quest. We tried several methods, but never really got them to look as awesome as the examples on the web. We also made fairy jars, but we had such a hard time getting the grass to stay inside the jars because of all the static that we decided this would be a fun challenge game for the teams, "Catch a Fairy in a Jar!"  I will post a followup on these with instructions and pictures.

Hey Listen.  Next we made Navi Pops. The kids absolutely devoured these.  Rosanna Pansino has a youtube channel called Nerdy Nummies where she demonstrates how to make all sorts of geek treats. Here is the link to her Navi Pop demonstration: Nerdy Nummies and below are some pictures of my daughter making ours.

We waited until the morning of the party to make the lemon bars so they were too warm to be sliced really nicely. Instead of the beautiful triangle servings I had pinned to my board we ended up with tiny triangles fitting together to make a big one. Eh.

For the games we had a quest to find objects and shoot targets with z-curve or nerf bow and arrow sets. Target shooting went on much longer than expected. We had cans of various sizes stacked on a bench and the aim was for teams of 2 to knock all of them off in the shortest time. But, they just wanted to keep setting them up and making new targets so this kept going for a long time.

The main game was musical splat. Some of the children chose to wear a trash bag to protect their clothes but most did not. The children walked around the table and when my daughter's ocarina playing stopped, the children had to lift the lids off of the pie tins (lids were paper plates with duct tape handles) and slap their hands into monster guts, gargoyle pieces, chu jellies, dragon tails, etc. (Really just fig preserves, ice rings, cherry fruit topping, mayonnaise with cheerios,  ketchup/mustard mix, etc.) One tin had a heart ring pop. That player was supposed to be out and the game continue, but everyone wanted to keep playing.  Everyone would point to and laugh at the person who ended up with the fig jelly. It was supposed to represent monster guts but the kids called it poop. Between rounds, the kids would run into the garage bathroom to wash their hands.

After the final wash we went inside for lasagna and spaghetti. After dinner, the kids drank Lon Lon milk and ate cookies and other treats. Then we went outside again for the pinata.

This event was planned and executed in a short time, but the party lasted 4 hours and everyone had a great time. Thanks for stopping by to read my post.

Party Summary

Minimal Decorations:

• Zelda stained glass window clings
• triforce pinata 
• stained glass style party crackers
• themed plates and napkins
• black placemats

The main themed snacks were:

• Lon Lon Milk.
• Triforce lemon bars.
• Jabu Jabu cups - blue Jello jigglers with Swedish fish.
• Green grass snacks - grapes, celery, snap peas, snow peas, cupcakes.
• Costco Macarons in Link's colors - green, yellow, tan and brown.

Themed Favors:

• Rupee crayons
• Hyrulian shield mint tins
• stickers
• tatoos

Quest Items:

• Treasure box with heart piece (heart ring pop)
• Poe soul (bottle with cloth head and food coloring)
• Fairy Jars (mason jar, glow bracelet and iridescent Easter grass)
• Sword under splat rock
• Boomerang

Games:

• Musical splat
• Catch a Fairy
• Z-curve Archery