Lego Mania!

Hilary

7 years ago

In our house we don’t just like Lego. In fact I think it would be a gross understatement to say like, and I’m not even sure the word love fits this bill. I think what we have borders on mania, yep, that’s it, Lego MANIA! In my book you’re never too old for Legos!

The boys have their sets:

And I have mine:

I might be a bit more disciplined when it comes to preserving what I’ve built, but the boys love to “free build” and enjoy all the special pieces that come with the various themed sets. Lego has provided our family countless hours of enjoyment and over the years we’ve built up quite a collection. We have sets in just about every theme available, and I’m quite sure we could invade a small country with our army of minifigures!

Because our mania runs so deep we’ve hosted not one, not two, but three different Lego themed parties over the years! Thinking of hosting your own Lego party? Check out some of these fun ideas:

Don’t Be the Missing Piece

These days digital invites rule, but I’m a theme girl and I love a good DIY project, so I decided to make the invitations when Simon’s turned 5. Who doesn’t love receiving a real invite in their mailbox?!

To make the invites pictured above, you’ll need the following supplies:

Red, white and yellow card stock, a circular paper punch, raised glue dots, Lego wrapping paper, and an inkjet printer. I downloaded the Lego font from the Internet as well as the Lego brick clip art.

Welcome to Legoland!

Decorations really add to the magic of any theme party! To create our own standees we had images of a traditional minifigure enlarged and then glued them to foam board. Recycled cardboard boxes and plastic cups were painted and repurposed into jumbo Lego bricks and we made our own window clings! Making your own window clings is easy! We used the Klutz Window Art Kit and printed our own images as templates. Do keep in mind that window art takes a full 24 hours to dry.

Lego Brick Cakes

To make these fun Lego brick cupcakes you’ll need the Lego silicone cake mold, which can be purchased online. To give the “bricks” color I added Wilton icing colors to the batter prior to baking. To ensure that the entire cake releases from the mold, studs included, be sure to grease all the nooks and crannies.

Rather then decorate them prior to the party we left the cakes unfinished and made decorating them into one of the party activities. A big hit with the kids!

Party Games

With Lego the possibilities are truly endless and we had a great time coming up with fun games for the kids to play. In order to cut down on the chaos we split the kids into groups as they arrived and had them rotate from station to station with decorate your own cake included in the game rotation. Once the kids had cycled through all the stations we turned on a Lego video to keep them entertained until it was time to go home.

Game ideas:

Memory – Show the kids a board full of Lego pieces for one minute and then ask them to write down as many as they can remember.
Find the Minifigure – hide minifigures around the house.
Lego Skee Ball – We created this skee ball game using an old carpet remnant and brightly colored paper.
Guess How Many – Fill a jar with Lego pieces and ask the kids to guess how many are in the jar.
Build the tallest tower.
Lego trivia game.
Free building

Take Home Treats

Making candy Lego bricks and Minifigures is a fun and easy project that everyone can participate in, and they make a great take home! My boys loved helping! Lego makes ice trays in both shapes and they can be ordered from Amazon, or directly from the Lego website. We chose to use the already colored Wilton Candy Melts to keep things simple, but using white chocolate and adding color works just as well and is probably a little tastier. If you want to make things really easy forget using colors and just use milk chocolate!

The melting process is simple and quick, just put the candies into a microwave safe bowl and heat them for one minute at a time on 50% power. Depending on how many melts you have in the bowl you may need to do this more than once. Stir them each time and keep in mind the melts won’t look softened until you stir them. For more control I used decorating bottles to fill the molds. The melts harden back up very quickly, so using one color at a time will you give you the best results.

To keep the layers of candy from bleeding into each other paint a thin layer of candy onto the bottom of the mold using a small brush. You’ll repeat this process for each color and then fill the molds to the top.

Once filled tap the molds on the counter to bring the air bubbles to the surface and then put them in the refrigerator or freezer to set. 5 to 10 minutes will do the trick!

Lego Iron-on T-shirts

To make these fun iron-on t-shirts you’ll need the following supplies:

Cotton t-shirts (any inexpensive brand), transfer paper for light fabric if you’re using white shirts, inkjet printer, lint brush, hot iron, scissors, wash and dry the t-shirts before getting started.

For this project we found free clipart online, but I’ve also had great luck finding images on Etsy. Before printing the image onto the transfer paper it’s a good idea to do a test run with a plain piece of paper to make sure it’s in the paper bin properly. My favorite brand of transfer paper is Avery. Use the normal or best ink setting on your printer for the best results. Cut the images as close to the edge of the images as possible making sure there is very little white space.

In preparation for pressing your image, iron the t-shirt by itself to remove any wrinkles or moisture in the fabric. I also like to run a lint brush over the shirt to make sure there isn’t any laundry lint that could show through the images once they’re pressed on.

Press the images onto the t-shirt using the hottest setting on your iron and make sure to apply quite a lot of pressure with both hands. Move the iron around until you’ve gone over the entire image. Depending on the size of the image you’ll need between 30 to 90 seconds of pressing.