Lion Photo board

alex loves these photo props whenever we go to some festival or anything that has them. in fact, the little market where we pick up our CSA has a full vegetable photo prop and every week she wants her picture taken in one of the veggies. so i thought it would be fun to have a photo board at her carnival birthday party for the kids to get their pictures taken. i only needed the board to last for one party indoors so i chose to make the photo prop with foam board. i also wanted to cut out teeth and such and really didn't want to deal with cutting that out of plywood. first, i drew the image on the computer to scale (i actually looked up the average head size and height of a six year old.) i printed out the full sized image in tiles and glued those down to the foam core (if i did this again i would skip the tiling and gluing and just sketch straight to the board.) i then cut out the mouth and painted over the tiled paper template i made - i had to paint at least two layers of acrylic to get a nice vibrancy. then i bought cheap molding and some hinges from home depot to build the frame. i basically build a simple swing easel to the back and glued it to the foam core with a few large tacks. i was going to add black fabric to the back so you couldn't see what was behind the kid's head, but thought that might make it harder for them to just walk right up for their photo. i think it was a nice addition to the party for both decoration and for fun. i forgot to bring the polaroid so i printed the pictures of the kids lion shots and included them with their thank you notes.

carnival party goody bags

alex had her first friends birthday party last weekend and the theme was carnival. i posted a while ago about how i screen printed the goody bags: http://boogiebeans.blogspot.com/2012/10/carnival-goody-bags.html with the ferris wheel design. then we filled the bags with carnival themed goodies. we included a mini skeeball game, an animal eraser (there were lions, tigers, elephants and zebras), a clown nose, a four color pencil (i love those pencils), a glow bracelet, carnival graphic temporary tattoos, cotton candy fluff stuff candy, and the retro packaged cracker jacks box. alex really enjoyed handing out a goody bag to each of her friends at the end of the party.

carnival goody bags

i showed you the shirts i made for alex's carnival birthday party. on the shirts i had screenprinted some silver ferris wheels. i used the same screen to create all her goody bags. i bought some super cheap natural fabric bags from oriental trading company. and then i printed the ferris wheels on all of them in black. i like them simple and plain like this with plenty of room for any size goody we decide to stuff them with. of course, alex thinks i need to add more color to them and print "carny" on these as well, but that's unlikely to happen.