Chapter 3: Book Party Fun and Games

The action intensifies in this chapter as our party guests solve puzzles and fashion accessories appropriate for bibliophiles.

In the book party invitations, our guests were instructed to come to the party dressed as a favorite character from a book, but NOT to tell anyone who they were. I was unprepared for the level of enthusiasm, with which they took this challenge. They were especially excited to guess who their friends might be. Although, no one guessed my daughter’s somewhat loose interpretation of her character. Can you guess who she is supposed to be? (Answer at the bottom of the post)

As the guests arrived they worked on guessing who the characters were, and on solving a word find full of Kira’s favorite books.

Each guest had also been instructed to bring a wrapped used book to exchange. We handled this like the White Elephant Christmas game where you draw numbers and choose, but can steal if someone has a gift that you want. This was quite fun, but I must say that children are far less willing to steal from each other than adults are. At least these children were all very polite.

At this point in our story, we split up into groups to make book-themed projects. At one station, we made these origami corner heart bookmarks out of book pages from the books I had previously destroyed in making the decorations. We followed the directions from this video on Instructables.

With the other group, we took advantage of my Silk Screen kit from Plaid Crafts and I help each child screen their own Bookworm bag.

I had ordered a special purple bag for the birthday girl and we adorned hers with glitter (after the guests had returned home, that is).

They really enjoyed this activity and getting to exercise their creativity.

Perhaps the climax of our story was the breaking of the book-shaped piñata. It was at the request of the birthday girl that we had a piñata at all, and I must credit her as author of the Title of our book/piñata: “The Birthday Bash!”  Clever! No? Perhaps I should let her author this blog for me? She specifically requested a piñata that would actually break, since apparently some of our DIY piñata attempts of the past, may possibly have been over-engineered–though I can’t imagine who would do such a thing (BSB).

After much contemplation, the easiest piñata solution, was simply to decorate an appropriately-sized cardboard box as a book (after BSB had reinforced the hook it would hang from–got to get that engineering in there some where!).

We wrapped the “pages” in white tissue paper and drew on the lines. Then wrapped the book in purple (ish pinkish) wrapping paper, with a spine of black wrapping paper. A gold paint pen served nicely to add the title and some details on the spine.

And it worked! And broke, after all of the guests had had a turn to “bash” it.

Although I know this chapter was thrilling, our tale has not yet reached it’s conclusion!

Return to the Table of Contents, to get the whole story!

*Have you guessed her costume yet? The answer is here. And the inspiration here.*