Episode VII Party - Luke and Leia

INVITATIONS:  I had too many ideas, so I combined them all into a 3-page card. The front cover had a black background and simply said A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .  The second page used the opening crawl font and style with the heading Episode VII and told the story of how DS Skywalker was looking for Padawans to restore peace to the galaxy and asked all Padawans to report to Yoda on Dagobah.  The third page was simply a pop-up Millenium Falcon, using the pattern from the Robert Sabuda website.  

DECORATIONS:  This was my first party away from home, and we rented a little village hall, meaning that we were fairly limited in what we could do for decorations.   I framed the entryway with foil star helium balloons and had the party pack table at the centre of the back wall.  This looked great as the party packs were an army of 14 Stormtrooper heads and 14 Darth Vader heads.  I also had life-size R2-D2 and C3PO cut-outs and some starry night scene setter to complete the look.  Inside the hall I used more of the starry night scene setter, and hung blueprints of Star Wars vehicles around the room.   At the grown-up food table we had a Mos Eisley Cantina sign. 

COSTUMES:  My son dressed as Luke, my daughter as Leia (in a gorgeous outfit I found on Etsy), my husband was Yoda and I was Amidala.  The facepaint made my outfit, even with the cheap plastic mask.  The guests were all given Jedi robes and belts that I had simply cut from coffee sacks so that each had a hood and armholes.  I used simple brown cotton fabric and tore belts.

ACTIVITIES:  As the children arrived Luke and I greeted them, gave them their costumes and then explained that Luke’s droids had been taken to pieces and that he needed their help to put them back together.  They then went into the main hall, where I had a wide assortment of medium-sized cardboard boxes painted either gold, silver, black or grey; a pile of small boxes; bottle caps, plastic trays, markers, tape and some stickers.  The kids had a ball building robots and nearly all of them told me what their robot’s special skill was.  This was a great use of my recycling. Once everyone had arrived and had a chance to build their droid, Luke helped me gather them all together and I announced that it was time to begin the training.  As we had a lot of kids with a broad range of ages (3-10), I split them into groups roughly by age and they then went through a rotation of Jedi-training.

1.  Hoth Ice Spheres A grown-up leader told them that they had to use their lightsabers to wipe out the ice spheres before they slimed our spaceship.  What they did is to pop bubbles with the cheap light-up light sabers I found on Amazon.  

2.  Mind Over Matter I walked them through a few ‘mysterious’ excercises, including having someone stand in a doorway and press their arms against the frame so that their arms floated upwards when they stepped out, and had them lie on the floor with a partner raising their feet for a few minutes, then lowering them down so that they felt their feet were going to hit the floor several inches before they did.  

3.  Rogue Moon of Taris Yoda helped the Padawans use lightsabers to get the Rogue Moon back into orbit.  Really they were in the parking lot using the lightsabers to bounce a balloon around a circular course.  

4.  Lucrehulk Invasion A grown-up leader told the kids that Lucrehulk ships were invading and preventing the kids from using their hands.  The kids had to destroy the ships using only their mouths.  Really they had to eat donuts hanging from a string without using their hands.  This was everyone’s favorite game!  I will say that the lightsabers were only used for the specific game and were put away immediately afterwards and that we didn’t have any accidents. Once the training was over, we gathered them all together again and pronounced them Jedi, then gave them their mission.  They had to travel through space to find the Death Star.  First part:  They all decorated foam rockets that Yoda then helped them launch from the launch pad (air compressor).  Some didn’t make it far, and some flew well a lot of fun!  Second part:  Each child got a turn to use the ‘lightsaber’ (wooden stick wrapped with tape) to hit the Death Star (piñata that I made).  A surprise in this was that as I had used thin glow sticks as one of the fillers, some activated and were glowing through the holes the first kids made.  My other fillers were:  glow in the dark stars, mini Milky Way bars, Galaxy chocolate stars and mini Mars bars.

FOOD:  After all that training, everyone was hungry, and they sat at the table where each one had a white paper cup which I had hand-drawn to look like R2-D2 (the cup was upside down), a wooden fork from Etsy that said The fork is strong with this one, a red plastic knife with a black paper hilt decorated to look like a lightsaber.  For food, I cut tortillas with my Millenium Falcon sandwich cutter (from Williams Sonoma) and turned those into cheese pizzas; I wrapped long breadsticks with Kraft singles, then added some red leceister decorations to make them lightsabers; I made Tie-Fighter sausage rolls from the Star Wars cookbook and added a small chocolate that I molded in my Han Solo in Carbonite silicon mold (from ebay).  To drink we of course had Yoda Soda lime sherbet and 7-Up; and bottles of water. The grown-ups had brisket chilli in the slow cooker, homemade queso, tortilla chips with all the other trimmings; and an assortment of crostini that my friends made.

CAKE:  Luke’s cake was a simple round cake covered in black fondant swirled with a bit of white and sprinkled with gold and silver star sprinkles.  This was topped with the Wilton ball pan Death Star, and then I had Hasbro Luke and Darth Vader figures on either side

FAVORS:  My friends helped me make paper party-packs half of which looked like the face of Darth Vader and half of which looked like the face of a Stormtrooper.  We used a combination of white and black craft foam cut outs with a black marker and we were delighted with the results.  Inside the kids got some stubby glowsticks, Star Wars fruit snacks and Star Wars character lollipops, from Etsy. The birthday boy had a brilliant day!