Crafting an Elmo and Cookie Monster Themed Birthday Party

My two year old son is having his second birthday party, so he has not developed a lot of interests yet. One thing he does love, however, is Elmo and Cookie Monster. This is great because it gives us a theme for his birthday party (I never had a theme party when I was a kid, Elmo or otherwise).

One problem with an Elmo theme is that anything with the Elmo name on it is EXPENSIVE! Therefore, with a limited budget, my wife and I had to figure out how to do things on the cheap. Fortunately for us, the internet has a LOT of resources available for those making Elmo crafts, and crafts devoted to his sidekick, Cookie Monster.

First we bought Wilton's Elmo cake pan, and have done a practice run. I will most likely use fondant for the eyes, nose, and mouth, whereas previously we used a smoothed out butter cream frosting.

I could not get the balloons to look right, so we will be buying an Elmo balloon, and a Cookie Monster balloon from a party store, and buying red and blue complimentary color 'plain' balloons to 'stretch out' our decorating budget.

My wife insisted on invitations, so I looked around online for inexpensive invitations and could not find any for cheaper than a few dollars for a package of five. That was too expensive for me, so using my handy Silhouette paper cutter, I took a coloring page of Elmo and Cookie Monster, and created little folding decorations out of a slightly fuzzy, textured scrapbook paper I found at Hobby Lobby. Fortunately they had both red and blue available. That combined with some googly eyes made adorable invitations.

I also was going to do place setting tags for the table, but realized that we had far more people coming than we had space at the table, so I converted that idea into making Elmo and Cookie Monster face masks for the kids. I gave Gabriel a sample one, and he destroyed it instantly, so that was not going to work either.

Because the cake was a bit small, I wanted to decorate sugar cookies as well, in Elmo and Cookie Monster shapes. Unfortunately, I could not find any Elmo cookie cutters (a good market for someone who can make such things), and so I used a gingerbread model, some red and blue food paste, and tried my best to come up with a reasonable Elmo cookie.

Coming up next will be some of the presents I made for my son, with a little help from the internet.