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Are you planning your very own Mad Hatter Tea Party with your friends? Celebrating your Unbirthday? Or are you having a croquet game in your backyard?
You can find many ideas about how to decorate your Alice in Wonderland theme party, what to eat and drink, and what games to play with your guests.
These tips are also great for an Alice in Wonderland wedding theme, Sweet Sixteen birthday, baby shower, or other parties.
Party invitations:
Have your invitations come from the Fish-Footman, addressed to `For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.’
Tell your guests not to be late for a very important date, like the White Rabbit
Ask them to meet you in Wonderland
Put a teabag, playing cards, or other stuff together with the invitation into the envelope
Shape your invitations like a playing card, tea bag, teapot or tea cup. Or make a top hat, and replace the 10/6 card with a card containing the party details.[singlepic id=56 w=320 h=240 float=right]
Decorations:
Set up a long table, covered with all different kinds of tea pots, mismatched teacups and saucers, chandeliers, etc. Combine normal sized teacups with some tiny ones.Use a colourful table cloth. Have an assortment of ‘odd’ chairs around the table, so that people have to sit at different heights. Place a large armchair at the head of the table, for the main guest.
Hide a stuffed toy in a teapot to represent the doormouse in one of the teapots.
Hang colorful paper lanterns above the table
Scatter Alice in Wonderland related items across the table, like little golden keys and keyholes
Decorate your door so it represents the rabbit hole, or the looking glass, where people have to go through to enter the party. Or use a play tunnel.
Hang up signs with ‘this way’, ‘that way’, ‘up’, ‘down’, etc. painted on them, like in Disney’s Tulgey wood.
Put some clocks in the room that are stopped at tea-time.
Decorate the walls with playing cards (normal size or really huge cards from cardboard), and the floor with a chessboard-like pattern. Scatter around some chess pices.
Hang a branch to the ceiling with a Cheshire Cat plush (or just it’s grin) in it.
Use lawn flamingos
[singlepic id=55 w=320 h=240 float=left]If you have a fireplace, put a large mirror on the mantelpiece. Or attach one to a door so people can actually go through the looking glass. If you don’t have a huge mirror, create one with aluminium foil
Make rabbit paw tracks and put them on the floor, leading in various paths through your house and/or garden
Put up a children’s swimming pool to represent the pool of tears
Make vulture heads and paste them on top of some umbrella’s. Hang the opened umbrella’s from the ceiling
Buy rose bushes at a garden store and decorate them with white and red roses
Stuff a big Alice-like doll into a small doll-house
Fill vases with white and red roses, and hide one or several brushes with red paint in them
Games:
Play lawn croquet: with hedgehog plush toys as balls, or perhaps hedgehogs painted on the balls. Attach colored and stuffed socks to the end of the mallets and sew on eyes, to represent flamingos, or use a plush flamingo. Create large cardboard playing cards for the arches.
Play chess. You can do this on a normal sized chessboard, or you can make a huge chessboard in your garden and have your guests play the pieces!
Play “pin the grin on the Cheshire Cat”
Turn on the TV and play Alice in Wonderland movies during the party.
Buy white tea pots and tea cups, and paint your own tea set.
Do the Caucus race. Make your guests run around in a circle, and when you shout ‘stop’ the last one to sit down/run to the middle is out. Or make a caucus version of the game musical chairs, where you remove one of the chairs each round and people have to find a chair to sit on when the music (the caucus race song from the Disney movie) stops.
Make up silly riddles
Play ‘Paint the roses red’. Buy some fabric white roses and red paint (or markers). The person (or team) who finishes painting his rose first wins. You could give time penalties for sloppy painting or spilled drops. You could also set a general time limit and have someone dressed as the Queen of Hearts storm into the room when the time is up.
Buy some basic top hats and let your guests decorate them
Hide a small golden key or a White Rabbit plush and have your guests find it
Do a quiz with trivia questions based on the Alice stories
Play games with a ‘Contrariwise’ theme: make people name stickers, where you write their names on backwards. Everyone must call everyone else by their backwards name, or risk a forfeit. You could invent a game where names must be called, or you could just have this going on throughout the party. Also, you could ask people questions and they must give the opposite answer. Or, say the answer, but backwards. For most of these games, some kind of time pressure is essential to make it more difficult and to make people make mistakes and have to do forfeits. The more adult the party, the more adult the questions. ‘Have you ever done xyz?’ would be interesting if people have to say the opposite. It becomes more like a truth or dare game then.
Make a game of Clean Cup: have guests assemble at table. They fill their plates with food and make their tea (or other drink) as they like for a certain amount of time. When the time is over, say “Clean cup. Clean cup. Move down. Move down.” The guests move to the next place and put more food on the plate and change the tea however they wish. This goes on and on until everyone returns to their own place setting. Now, everyone must eat and drink what the others have put. Prizes can be awarded to the most weird concoction.
Make coloring pages for children so they can paint the roses red
Make teams, put a bucket (or large teapot) with tea on one side and an empty one on the other side of a course. Your guests have to fill a teacup, run to the other side (with the cup in their hands, or balancing them on their heads…), and empty the cup there. The team that has filled the bucket first wins.
Paint some unboiled eggs to resemble Humpty Dumpty. Form teams. Lay each of the eggs on a spoon – one egg per team. Your guests have to put the other end of the spoon into their mouths, and run to the other side of the field as fast as they can without dropping the egg (and without using their hands to keep it from falling). Then they have to hand over the spoon with the egg to their teammates, who have to run back. Repeat this until all team members have run the course. The team that finishes first without dropping the egg, wins. If you drop the egg and it is still in one piece, you may continue. If the egg breaks, you’re out!
Have an “I’m late!” potato sack race, in which everyone has to hop to the finish like the White Rabbit.
Gather a lot of teacups and put them upside down on a table. Under one of them, you hide a Dormouse (or White Rabbit). Your guests take turns and may lift one cup per turn to see whether something is underneath it. The one who finds the Dormouse wins. You can make the game harder by inventing extra rules, like shuffling the cups after each turn.
Get a hookah and attach a bubble blower to the end (or create one by bending a wire), so you can blow soap bubbles. Who makes the largest?
Dance the Lobster Quadrille
And of course, don’t forget: EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes!
Food & drinks:
Attach labels with the words ‘EAT ME’ and ‘drink me’ to all kinds of things, like the sugar bowl and bottles.
Bake little cupcakes with the words ‘eat me’ written on them in icing
Bake cookies in the shape of the letters EAT ME, and/or hearts, clubs, diamond and spades. You can also use cookie cutters to shape sandwiches.
Serve lots of (ice)tea, edible mushrooms, pepper soup or Mock Turtle soup, oysters, plum-pudding, and a leg of mutton. Also bring a bag with ham-sandwiches and hay.
Glue the lid on a jar of jam, so nobody is able to open it. You know, the rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day…
Make a cake in the shape of a mushroom or teapot. Or a three-tiered cake like in the Disney movie.
From a loaf of bread you can create bread-and-butterflies
Boil some eggs and paint them to resemble Humpty Dumpty. You can also have your guests paint the eggs during the party. Alternatively, leave one of the eggs unboiled… surprise when they want to eat it! This is the Humpty Dumpty who fell off the wall…
Order (or create) some custom made tea bags or tea favors for your guests
