Alice Party - Painting The Roses Red Game

DECORATIONS  The biggest hit of the party was the 'rabbit hole'.  We taped a cardboard box to the doorframe in the dining room and hung a curtain around it.  We invited the kids to crawl through the 'rabbit hole' into the party.  The kids loved it, and kept crawling through the 'rabbit hole' throughout the party. 

For wall decorations, we bought a box of jumbo-sized playing cards and taped them around the walls.  We also typed up cute quotes from the movie 'Alice in Wonderland' (e.g. Sentence first Verdict afterwards") and hung them around the house.  We hung 'drink me' tags to all the cups and drinks.  We used these same tags to label the food and drinks.  So for example one side said 'Drink me' and the other said 'Lemonade'. 

ACTIVITIES  For my daughter's Alice in Wonderland Birthday Party we played "Painting the Roses Red" which is a version of 'Hot Potato'.  I printed out pictures of roses and gave one to each child.  The children sat in the circle with their pictures and we handed them one red marker.  The child with the marker had to color a bit of their flower then pass the marker. 

I dressed up as the red queen and hid around a corner then would pop out and scream "Off with her head" at the child with the marker who was then out.  The winner of the game is either the final child in or else the child who manages to color their entire rose first. 

The children who got out immediately received a container of bubbles to play with so nobody was too upset about being out.  Many of the children who got out joined me in hiding and shouting. 

We also played a tea relay race by separating the kids into two teams and placing a two teapots at the end of the course.  During the first leg of the race each child had to carry a cup of water to the teapot.  During the second leg of the race they had to balance a teabag on their head and place it in the teapot when they reached it.  During the third leg of the relay race they had to balance a sugar cube on a spoon.  For each leg after they added the ingredient to the teapot they raced back to tag the next member in line then got to the back of the line. 

We also played "Pin the Grin on the Cheshire Cat" (an idea from this site) and broke a pinata in the shape of Tweedledee and Tweedledum which we made by paper macheing two balloons together. 

CAKE  I made two cakes for the party.  The first was a topsy-turvy cake.  I baked three layers and cut each layer on a diagonal to make it crooked.  (To keep the cake balanced simply carve out a flat portion in the bottom layer to stack the next layer on.) 

The second cake was inspired by the first one: since I only had one cake pan I had to carve out smaller circles for the top two layers which left two rings of cake.  I stacked the cake rings together to create a 'Rabbit Hole' cake and frosted it lavender.  I covered the hole in the middle of the cake with cake sprinkles and made a white rabbit out of gum paste and placed him in the hole so that when the kids looked down into the middle of the cake the white rabbit was staring up at them. "