Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

As some of may have noticed I love to make party decorations.

This is great, as both my kids are young and have many more birthday for me to decorate.

Ian’s birthday is in March and I make him start deciding on a theme in December and verify it in January. This might seem difficult for a 4 (soon to be 5!) year old boy…..But Ian is different. Basically when he decides something, that’s it. He picks his Halloween costumes out 3 months in advance and doesn’t change his mind. So I know that if he decides he wants a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle party for his 5th birthday, that’s the party he is going to get.

I loved TMNT growing up and I love that Ian does too. Now they are different and I am not entirely sold on them yet, but it’s the thought right?

I couldn’t wait to share all the projects I made for Ian’s birthday and this months Silhouette Challenge “Party” fit so perfectly. I already shared how I made his pretty awesome invitations so I am not going to go into that again.

Here are the decorations from the party we had in March, I know….March was moths ago, don’t judge. (I will warn you, this post is heavy with pictures)

I actually had plans to make rosettes with all the turtles, but only got Mikey done. I was really please how the turtle head turned out after tracing and cutting with my Silhouette Cameo.

For Ian’s Superhero Party I made a city-scape backdrop for the food table, which of course I didn’t keep. Since I had to make a new one, I used my Silhouette and cut a stencil out of contact paper. It made painting the building super easy.

I just used white duck tape for the road lines on the black table cloth. The sewer grate and decorations on the colored circles hanging down were made with the Print and Cut feature.

I had this grand idea for the food labels, instead of using the table tents, like I normally do. I would make them like large cupcake toppers and just stick them in the food.

This is where planning ahead is important. I already had my menu planned, so it was easy to print and cut the food labels prior to the party.

My idea mostly worked, but a few things needed giant marshmallows as stands.

I was really happy how my pennant banner turned out. I used the sketch pens to draw the face before cutting out the triangle and then used the Print and Cut feature for the masks.

For Ian’s “Happy Birthday” Banner I wanted to use the same face as I did for the giant rosette. I ended up adding the black outer layer to give it more dimension. I just had to trace the image in three parts.

The pieces that had letter on them did not get the black outline, or white eyes. I didn’t want to take away from the letters.

Since there are four turtles I wanted to have all of them up there, so I made a turtle shell to go in between happy & birthday.

Because the number of letters in my banner is odd, I didn’t have a symmetrical color pattern. Don’t look too closely.

The turtles all started with some toxic ooze so we needed a warning sign. Using a wood sign, scrapbook paper, and distressing ink I made a sign for the vinyl letters and danger symbols.

I was going to use vinyl for the green ooze, but decided to try some paint. After painting on the drips, I just went ahead and let the paint drip down the sign. It was one of those “umm…why didn’t I do this earlier? because it is so much easier” moments.

It gets hung on the front of my mom’s house (Party Local), which is where I hang all my party signs.

When Ian decided to have a TMNT party I was at Target and they had these buckets in the dollar spot. I decided not to wait till the month of his party to buy them. So glad I did, cause they were gone the next time I went. We filled them with stickers, candy, TMNT fruit snacks, little pens, and Toxic Ooze (of course).

With my Silhouette I made “Thanks for shell-abrating” tags for the buckets.

The stickers for the ooze were made with Silhouette’s clear sticker paper. I had the kids all help make the ooze and fill the cups.

I bought this cute little pizza box design from the Silhouette store and used the Print and Cut feature to cut them out. I put all the stickers for their buckets in the pizza boxes.

We also made masks & turtle shells for all the kids to wear and take home.

The windows on the box buildings were cut using my Silhouette. I was trying to decided between a stencil and paper, and the paper was easier.

My wonderful aunt who makes our birthday cakes was sick, so we went with cupcake for this party. I didn’t have time to make all the cupcake wrappers but there was about a dozen that had them.

I had been collecting the mini-pizza boxes to use at the party and we put some of the cupcakes in them.

For the top cupcake I made a big topper with Ian’s favorite turtle. I also used some plastic TMNT cups that I bought as center pieces. I cut out designs and inserted them in the cups with florist foam. Unfortunately I don’t have a great picture of them.

Want to Check Out More Silhouette Projects?

My Silhouette Challenge buddies and I are all sharing projects on our blogs today, so peruse the projects below for a wealth of Silhouette inspiration!

1. Two Purple Couches // 2. Practically Functional // 3. Crafty Bonds // 4. Dragonfly & Lily Pads // 5. From Whine to Whine // 6. Simply Kelly Designs // 7. unOriginal Mom // 8. MamaSonshine // 9. Get Silvered // 10. Made in a Day // 11. Weekend Craft // 12. Little Blue’s Room // 13. The Stamp Doc // 14. The Thinking Closet // 15. Cupcakes&Crowbars // 16. Where The Smiles Have Been // 17. DIYJustCuz // 18. My Paper Craze

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I feel a little behind this year. Ian’s birthday is next month and I have only been working on his invitations for about a week.

Ian decided in December that he wanted a Ninja Turtle birthday party. I knew it was on the list of parties but didn’t know he wanted it this year. (He has the next six birthday’s planned, yep, he takes after me.)

I decided I wanted his invitations to be a pop-up card with the front as a sewer cover. I designed them knowing I would need to use my favorite thing about the Silhouette. It’s Print ‘N Cut feature!

It is the main reason I got it and it just so happens that this month’s Silhouette Challenge was to make a project using this very thing I love so much.

I started with a picture of a NYC manhole cover. I used Photoshop to make the sewer cover look a little more comic-booky. I couldn’t find a TMNT one with out words on it, and while I could have altered it in Photoshop to remove the words, I just didn’t want to go the trouble, this was easier.

I had thought about having just a circle card, but the pop-up part would have been to small, or the circle card would have been too big. So I used a card template from SVG Cuts Haunted Forest kit.

I needed something above the manhole cover, and I didn’t want to use a solid color so I used a picture of NYC that I found on one of the TMNT sites. Since the angle of the city is from the street it worked perfectly. For that part and the sewer cover I used the fill with pattern feature, or more accurately, I dragged and dropped the pictures into the shapes.

I used foam dimensional tabs to raise the ‘Let’s Party’ text.

I didn’t want to apply the letters individually to each invitation. I connected them with the offset tool, I made the offset as small as possible while still maintaining connections between each letter.

It was still in two parts, but that was better than 9 parts.

I made the “Ian is turning 5” part in Photoshop and traced it in Studio.

But a TMNT party invitation would not be complete with out some Ninja Turtles!

p.s. I decided to use the Old-School version from my childhood because I like them the best.

I traced a PNG copy of a picture of the four of them coming out of a sewer. This was the part that I wanted to use as a pop-up.

It is pretty amazing how close and accurately the Silhouette cuts with the print ‘n cut feature. I could even cut out the little spaces on the bottom that would have been white after printing. There is no way I would have been able to cut that out by hand.

The party information will be printed out on vellum and attached to the bottom of the inside. I decided on vellum because I didn’t want the inside to be white. I could have printed it on colored paper, but with the size of the card I couldn’t get two on one page, and I hate wasting paper.

Stay tuned for how the party turned out and all the other things I will make, although you will have to wait till a couple of months.

Want to Check Out More Silhouette Projects?

My Silhouette Challenge buddies and I are all sharing projects on our blogs today, so pursue the projects below for a wealth of Silhouette inspiration! With a heavy emphasis on hearts!