Barbie & Hot Wheels Party -4yr- Barbie Lolipops

For my daughter's fourth birthday party I was stuck for an idea as she loved Barbie at the time, but over half of her little friends were boys.  So, I had to come up with an idea for both of them.  It seemed that whenever we would go to the store, (or even at McDonald's!) the toys were always Barbie for the girls and Hot Wheels for the boys.  So, armed with this info, I searched this website for ideas and saw many great ones for carnival parties.  I did some modifying, and hence, The Barbie & Hot Wheels Extravaganza was created!  The party looked something like this: 

We invited 5 boys and 5 girls.  All were about 4 or 5 years old, but this would work for many ages.  Went sent out Barbie invites to the girls and Hot Wheels invitations to the boys.  I set up the party like a carnival.  Because of monsoon season here in August, I decided to have the party inside to keep out of the rain.  I turned every room in the house into a carnival booth.  Half of the games were Barbie themed and half were Hot Wheels.  I modified regular carnival games to fit the themes.  We had the Barbie Lollipop Pick, Barbie Ring Toss, Barbie Bean Bag Throw, Hot Wheels Racing Pond, Hot Wheels Racetrack & Hot Wheels/Barbie Tattoo Booth.  Everything was really cheap because I created everything on the computer or with craft supplies. 

For the Barbie Lollipop Pick, I took a piece of wood and cut it into a 12x12 square.  I drilled rows of holes into it big enough to hold a lollipop stick and a larger hole in the center.  I wrapped the board in Barbie wrapping paper and then used the lollipops to poke through the paper into the pre-drilled holes.  I scanned and printed a picture of Barbie from the Nutcracker video, cut out her head, laminated it and glued it to a larger stick with curly ribbon and stuck that in the larger hole in the center.  I used three different magic markers to color the ends of the sticks and prizes were given according to the color the kids picked. 

For the Barbie Ring Toss, I just used a regular ring toss game, for which I printed out and laminated images of Barbie's head and glued one to the top of each stick. 

For the Barbie Bean Bag Throw, I covered three large coffee cans in Barbie wrapping paper.  Then I bought a half a yard of Barbie fabric and sewed three square shapes (like a pillow) and stuffed them with plastic pony beads I already had.  The kids used the bean bags to throw into the cans to win a prize. 

The Hot Wheels Racing Pond was my favorite!  I modeled it after the regular Duck Pond" carnival game where you pick up ducks and win a prize based on what number is on the bottom of the duck.  For this I printed out about 10 copies of a picture of a Hot Wheels car (all the same photo).  Then I cut them out and wrote either a number 1 2 or 3 on the backside of each car.  Then I laminated them cut them out and placed them in a tub of water number side down.  Because the cars were laminated they floated in the water just like the carnival ducks do! 

For the Hot Wheels Racetrack I bought an inexpensive race track that would race two Hot Wheels cars and had the kids race each other. 

Finally for the Hot Wheels/Barbie Tattoo Booth we had "flame" temporary tattoos for the boys and "princess" tattoos for the girls. (My daughter picked the Princess Barbie theme which coincidentally happened to be on clearance!) 

This is how we ran it:  I enlisted the help of the parents there and placed one adult at each booth.  I printed up color coded signs to hang at each game.  For example the Barbie games had pink purple and light blue signs and the Hot Wheels ones were red yellow and royal blue.  I also printed out tickets one for each game to give to the kids.  Because most of the kids there were not really able to read at that age although I printed the name of each game on the ticket I also color coded each one to match to the color of the sign at each game. 

That way the kids who couldn't yet read could find where they were going by matching the color of the ticket to the color of the signs at each game!  I placed the sorted tickets into ziploc bags with each child's name on them ahead of time so it was easy to hand them out.  Having only one ticket for each game insured that every kid would play each game and no one would be left out.  With 10 kids playing 6 games each there was plenty to do!  Each booth had candy (which you can buy 75% off after Halloween each year!) stickers and small Oriental Trader type toys for prizes.  The parents were instructed to give one of those three prizes everytime so all of the kids were winners.  This is what I did for the cake decorations and party bags:  I used either Barbie colored or Hot Wheels colored streamers and balloons to decorate each "booth". 

I set the table with Barbie & Hot Wheels plates & cups and used coordinating solid colored napkins and utensils.  I also made name cards for each place setting.  I just used some white card stock cut into rectangles.  I folded them in half and then cut out smaller rectangles of either Barbie or Hot Wheels wrapping paper and glued that on the front.  Then I printed each kid's name out on the computer and glued those to each card on top of the wrapping paper.  (I should also mention that everything that was printed at the party was either the "Barbie Font" which I used "Sky Pie" for or "Staccato" for the "Hot Wheels Font".  Then we made Hot Wheels $ Barbie colored cupcakes and placed them on a three tiered wedding stand in the middle of the table.  Finally I accented everything with pieces of curly ribbon and confetti on the tabletop. 

For the party bags I bought the Princess Barbie gift sacks for the girls and of course Hot Wheels bags for the boys.  I bought all Barbie trinkets (barrettes rings etc) from the dollar store and Hot Wheels items (cars stickers etc) for the boys.  I added pink tissue paper to the girls' bags and blue to the boys'.  Then I printed out fancy "princess" name tags with each girl's name and "winner's medal" type name tags for the boys and attached them to the gift bags with curly ribbon.  We served finger foods such as veggies goldfish chips etc. to keep the parents busy! 

And finally since I saved so much money doing everything else myself I rented a castle inflatable jumper to keep with the carnival theme.  Needless to say the kids had an AMAZING time and the parents thought I must have had WAY too much time on my hands to have been so detailed with everything!  This party can be adapted to fit any theme and is rather inexpensive if you have the time to create everything yourself.  I love this website and thank Birthday Party Ideas for the inspiration!  Happy partying!"