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As a child of the 1970s and 1980s I grew up with Sesame Street and The Muppet Show and loved them. Of course back then Sesame Street was very different. There was no Elmo or Abby. Everyone in our family had a favorite character. My oldest sister loved Kermit, my middle sister loved Oscar the Grouch and I loved Cookie Monster. I remember at one point saving my money to buy a new album. I was going to get the newest Shaun Cassidy (it was the 70s after all) and instead bought C Is for Cookie from Cookie Monster. I sang those songs all the time except I did sometimes change the title to C is for Carrie. My sister who also loved Shaun Cassidy thought I made a bad choice, but I loved my album.
My good friend's youngest son turned one last week. For his first birthday party she decided to do a Sesame Street themed party. She bought some decorations, but did much of it herself with some help from me and a few friends and her mom. She had the party at our church. She and her husband have large families, so there are a lot of people. She made some adorable tissue paper characters. They sat on the cake table. She got the idea here.
For decorations she had some Sesame Street tablecloths and bought a couple of decoration kits. Then she made favor bags. She had Cookie Monster, Elmo, Bert and Oscar. Sorry I didn't get any pictures of the Cookie Monster ones. She got the idea here.
Her mother and she made Elmo and Cookie Monster cupcakes. They were so cute!!
Then Hazel and I made a bowling game for the party. We were inspired by Sharing the Wealth: Sesame Street Birthday Party. They are very easy to make. We used empty plastic water bottles, construction paper and some printouts of the heads as well as Bert and Ernie's shirts. The heads are copyrighted, so I cannot share them, but I just googled the characters until I found what I wanted. I made them about 3.5 inches wide.
We wrapped the bottle in the paper and then glued on the heads. By the end of the party they were destroyed, but this is because several of the young boys were very hard on them and wanted to just kick and step on the bottles. We used the ball from one of Hazel's toy bowling sets.
She also bought a pin the nose on Elmo game. This would be pretty easy to make yourself. The one nice thing of the bought one is the noses were stickers.
She wanted two crafts for the kids whose ages really varied (one to preteen). The first was to decorate a hat with foam stickers.
Hazel wore her purple hat the entire time. She loved it! The second craft I found for her at Katherine Marie Photography. We decided to use paper cups instead of plastic for the ease of glue sticking.
These were the samples of Cookie Monster, Abby and Elmo that Hazel and I made. We only had pom poms and eyes. The two crafts got combined by the end and many of the older kids made character hats and used the foam on the cups. They had fun. So that was the fun first birthday party we went to this weekend!! So many great DIY ideas!! We loved it!!
