Minecraft Party – Seb is 7
‘For my birthday, can I have a Minecraft Party?’
That’s all we’ve heard since about February from Seb. I had a vision in my head: two hours, several small children, a tv and lots of square eyes.
So I decided to think about it a bit more. How can you have a Minecraft party that doesn’t just involve playing Minecraft – something with a bit more involved than just sitting in front of a television and arguments about whose turn it is next?
And this is what we came up with:
Minecraft Party Invitations
well, you can’t have a party without friends, can you? We used some free printables and made personalised invites, which we then folded up inside Minecraft blocks made from another free printable template.
Minecraft Party Decorations
I printed some tree blocks onto A3 paper, and cut out the squares. These were stuck to two columns in the room we hired and topped with green balloons and black and green streamers, to make it feel a bit less like ‘random hired generic space’ and more like ‘interesting Minecraft area’. I didn’t go over the top though because they weren’t going to be spending too long in the room, really. I got a green plastic tablecloth for the table, and square green and black plates with green cups for the food and drink (you could also use those to make a creeper collage decoration if you were feeling really awesome – I wasn’t!). I also got the kids some Minecraft ‘Box Heads’ to wear from Argos, which were great as a decoration when they all arrived too. They had a lot of fun with those, pretending to be the actual characters.
A Minecraft Crafting Table
This was made using a big bit of cardboard nicked from the backyard area of Iceland (I did ask for permission first!) and some black electrical tape.
Minecraft Sword Making
One piece of black architect’s board from Hobbycraft and a set of metallic foam square stickers from Baker Ross later, and we had all the ingredients we needed to make some Minecraft Swords. I stuck stickers onto the board to create one sword shape, then carefully cut that away from the board using a craft knife, before using it as a template to cut several other sword blanks for the kids to fill in with their own sticker designs. If I did this again I’d make the swords a little bigger, or use two layers of architect’s board, as the handle part was quite fragile and snapped reasonably easily (I had planned for this eventuality though, knowing that the kids were likely to be quite boisterous, and had some tape ready on hand).
The Minecraft Party Snack Table
As every good Minecrafter knows, you do need to keep yourself well fed to have enough energy to go out and get building. So we had a table with lots of themed nibbles available – red Haribo marshmallows from Poundland (redstone), blue ‘raspberries’ (diamonds), ‘TNT’ sticks made from red and black liquorice cables (TNT), GOLD bars (gold), twiglets (sticks), M&S mini flapjack bites (sand), cheesy crisps (carrots – I could have used carrot sticks too obviously, had I had any carrots), cookies (cookies), grapes (slimeballs), and watermelon sweets from Romford Market (watermelon – again you could use actual watermelon, again I didn’t have any).
Live action Minecraft
After a bit of food, they were ready to go out hunting for Creepers, Endermen, Skeletons and Pigs. I’d hired a room that was right next to an ‘abandoned mineshaft’ themed park, and we filled that with balloons with faces of the various characters on them. The kids all lined up at the top of the counting net, and after a quick ‘3, 2, 1…GO!’ they got to hunt for the characters and try and ‘kill’ (pop) them with their swords. We got them to pick up the popped balloons and put them in their pockets as evidence of how many they’d managed to get (also a sneaky way to make sure we didn’t leave bits of balloon all over the playground too!). Having the themed park was a big bonus but this worked so well I can imagine it would be great in any kind of outside location really, they had a lot of fun.
TV Minecraft
Following all that crafting and exercise we had the last half hour for the kids to actually play Minecraft, having borrowed a couple of extra controllers so four of them could play at once.
Minecraft Birthday Cake
The party was finished off as is traditional with everyone singing to Seb around his cake. Which was a Minecraft one, of course.
Minecraft Party Bags
As all the guests left, they were given a party bag which had been made to look like TNT (red paper bags from ASDA, TNT labels printed after downloading the Minecraft font). Inside the bag was a diamond bottle of bubbles (Home Bargains, 6 for 99p), a pickaxe pencil (eBay), some bouncing putty (also eBay), a Minecraft character keyring (set of 10 from Amazon), and a Minecraft block of sweets that I had made (cola bottles, green frogs and a green giant green marshmallow inside a clear acetate box).
And everyone was happy.
A photo posted by Mummy Is A Gadget Geek (@mummygadgetgeek) on
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