A green-er birthday.

This year for Doodle's birthday we tried to go a lot greener, we tried really hard not to buy anything new for decorations, favours or games. The only truly new thing was the cake ( and really, who wants to recycle cake....) It was a major family event, with everyone working to get things just right. In the end we had a great party for a lot of kids and grownups. And very little waste.

Here are some or our projects.

Using pieces of clothes and linens that were stained or torn. We put together a Happy Birthday banner that can be used for everyone's birthday. Can you spot my old pj's? Those old cloth napkins? The maternity shirt I wore to death? Crusty's t-shirt?


We filled the branch with woven felt fishies and cupcake liner jelly fish. Doodle dyed the white felt with liquid water colours, we cut them out and wove them together. The Jelly's are just cupcake liners and yarn. There are a ton of fish and sea creature crafts at Danielle's Place.


For favours we made paper mache sea floats. Dada was in charge of this one! We used newspapers from the junk mail and tissue paper from the used wrapping paper bin.



They were filled with, homemade candies, shells from the shell box, glass bubbles from the big bucket, sea star and shell shaped crayons ( recycled from the broken crayons in the crayon bin) and each had a clammy mascot made from the shell of clams we ate this summer. ( yes, we save everything that has crafty potential!)


The little clams were so easy! They are just a circle of fabric drawn up and filled with wool ( or fibre fill) We glued them into the shells and then added the google eyes. Presto! clams! My Granny used to do this with the giant geoduck shells. They were much more intimidating. These little guys are pretty friendly.



We played one game at the party, "Pin the beak on the Cepholopod"( thanks for that Auntie Jane!) Dada and the boys drew and coloured three big cepholopod pictures. Dada cut the beaks from the side of a cereal box. Everyone seemed to have fun trying to find the right place to put the beak! Andnow we all know that the major cepholopods alive to day are the octopus, the cuttlefish, and the squid!

Colouring the cepholopods!



Prizes for pinning the beak on the cepholopods were tiny DIY shrinky dink fish medals! Made from #6 plastic and shrunk in the toaster oven. We had the food grade plastic clamshells left over from some delicious scones made by Little Rae's Bakery, but you can find #6 plastic in most salad bars too. We used coloured pencils instead of permanent markers ( I am not that crazy) The boys spent several evenings colouring and shrinking fish. Very satisfying!


To keep people busy we also made tiny snow globes using old baby food jars, tap water, karo syrup, shells and small critters.


We did buy a few things.
Ingredients for the cake and some snacks.
The tiny creatures for the snow globes.
2 rolls of crepe paper streamers ( to be recycled into some other craft in the future)
and a few balloons. ( to be made into coffee can drums if I am brave enough....).


I am happy to say there was also not wasted cake.....I used the Magnolia Bakery recipe and it was delicious! It was my first time working with fondant and it looks OK from a distance! Certainly would not pass muster with a professional baker but it was fun to do and it got the Yellow Submarine/Octopus's Garden theme across. Crusty did the fish on the sides of the cake, I did the octopus, the sea stars and the submarine.






All in all it took us a couple of weeks to get everything done, each of us working on a project for an hour or so in the evening. After homework, waiting for dinner. It gave us all some fun things to do together and it made for a fun party!