Cape Party!

Last September, Diego asked for a "Cape and Mask" party for his 5th birthday.  With a brand new baby in the house, we needed to keep it fairly small.  He invited two close friends and their siblings, so we had a total of 6 kids ages 2 through 7.

To prepare for the party, I cut up several old t-shirts into the cape shape.  I made extras, so the kids could choose their color (and because I was ready to repurpose some worn out maternity shirts).  We went to the fabric store, and Diego picked out several scraps of fabrics and lots of trimmings.  He asked me to cut some circles, stars and lightning bolts out of felt and I made a shiny fabric letter for each of our guests.  I cut out mask shapes using craft foam, and assembled sequins, feathers, more trimmings, and elastic for the masks.  This probably sounds like a lot more work than it was!

For the party, I covered a table with kraft paper and put out all of the supplies.  The kids laid out the things they wanted on their capes, and the parents helped them with the glue.  (We used Fabri-Tac fabric glue that was very sticky, so there needed to be a lot of parent involvement with this part.)  Some of them really spent a lot of time on their capes.  The glue dried quickly, I threaded the ribbons through, and the kids started jumping around like crazy!  As you can see, the capes turned out to be beautiful.

Diego's cape is still worn almost daily by him or Ruben, and the mama of these darlings told me that their capes are also in frequent use:

The masks were amazing, too.  We used rubber cement to attach the decorations, and each one was so different from the others.

I love the asymmetric green rick-rack on this one, the way she glued two masks together, cut up a couple of pieces of daisy lace trim to make the flowers, and of course put on the nose pom-pom!  Kids make such cool stuff, don't they?

I plan to make capes with a very large preschool group in the fall.  I want to avoid the really sticky glue, so I think I'll use fabric markers, stencils, fabric paint and iron-ons for the decorations.  This might also be a fun activity for freezer paper stencils.