There ain't no party like an Octonaut Party

Sound the Octoalert!

Out last major project was Boy's Octonauts Party which involved a great deal of pillaging from Pinterest, the overuse of my printer, a house at glitter saturation point and time well spent curled up in front of the show for research purposes of course ;)

Here are some of the things we made, we'll start with the food:

These cheese sandwiches look a bit fishy!

Crab Croissants

Pepper and hummus octopus dip
Inspiration here

Clam biscuits with yoghurt covered strawberry pearls
Inspiration here

'Edible aquarium' served in a goldfish bowl

Hot dog octopi
Inspiration here

Octonauts cups were blue paper ones decorated with the Octoalert button:

And the birthday Boy's favourite, the birthday cake: 

This is made using a sandcastle cake mould available here
and decorated with digestive biscuit (or Graham Crackers for US visitors) sand as seen here

The cake recipe is a simple sponge cake recipe like this one however as with a complicated mould like one I knew I wouldn't be able to add buttercream and so to enhance the flavour a bit I used what I had at hand: Valencian Orange Extract, Orange Zest and Sprinkles to make a fruity and colourful sponge cake.

Party games:

Pin the eye patch on Kwazii game inspired by a ready made game
you can buy on etsy my homemade version used blue tack on the back
of the patches so even small children could play

Fishing game

Colouring and Craft table

The craft table featured printables available from the Octonauts website as well as an activity I devised inspired by an episode about decorator crabs. Decorator crabs use items found from their environment to hide from and warn off predators so here the children could use craft bits, stickers and pieces or card to decorate their own decorator crabs! Boy and I also spent some time learning about them whilst getting party stuff ready, watching youtube videos and getting a book from the library to learn about marine life. In fact the whole week prior to the party became an 'underwater week' doing lots of learning as we went about the various creatures we made for the party.

As the weather was nice and the beach was on our doorstep we also took all those buckets and spades and went to the beach! Which was wonderful, the other outside game was a big jumbo pack of bubble blowers and solution which the children loved going bubble mad in the sun.

Party Decorations:

Paper plate jellyfish using crepe paper and ribbon

Paper plate fish and seahorses we had a lot of fun making

More jellyfish! My kitchen was at one point nothing more than
a jellyfish drying station making them!

Finally the good bags to take home, a take on Peso's medical bag and they looked fantastic:

Inspiration here

My Octonauts themed gift to the birthday boy was done using this tutorial here using only a 'talking tin' and a bit of foam and was one of the biggest hits of the party! In fact Boy still sets it off a little too regularly, I am a little Octonauted out!

That's it for the Octonauts Party, I shall upload the party we did last year with a Lego theme soon :) Please let me know what you think in the comments I'd love to hear from you about my first post!