Cricket-Themed Birthday Celebration

Back in February we celebrated my son's birthday with a cricket-themed birthday party for 34 kids. No, it's not a typo, we hosted 34 kids on a warm, sunny Sunday morning. Mostly 9 year old boys. It was a big effort on the part of the grown-ups but the little people had a blast, especially with their water guns to keep cool with. Thanks go to the grandmothers, Sports Kickstart and other parent helpers for their assistance.

Ashley is passionate about cricket and sport in general so there really wasn't any other consideration for a birthday party theme. I made the above birthday card for him in keeping with this theme. The idea for the card came from the inspiring Jayne Mercer. I've used Just Cricket stamps on watercolour paper with markers to colour in the cricket bat. The background grass is from Inspired by Nature - this grass has so many uses, I never knew how much I needed it until I acquired it.

On the day of his birthday, Ashley opened gifts and enjoyed a home-made chocolate cake. It was a quick after-school and post-work effort so I was lucky to find these little cake decorating charms at Woolworths:



Pretty cool heh? But for his party, he wanted a cricket pitch cake. Out came the old edition of Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Cookbook and I started to scope out the job. There were thoughts of coconut tinted green for grass but I was beginning to feel overwhelmed - and the birthday boy objected to coconut ("I don't like it") - so along came Veronika from Sugar Dreams Cake Design who made this beautiful cake:



If you're into cricket, you'll note the play on words with Ash's Cricket (versus Ashes Cricket).

In my next life, I'm going to take up cake decorating because it seems like a lot of fun....thanks for stopping by.

Love from Crafty Kim