Print and Cut, Still a Favorite! | This WONDERfilled Life
So we’re a few days away from Bubba’s big day and *I think* I have everything under control. While I am behind my own self imposed timeline for things being finished I am admittedly WAY ahead of where I was this same time frame when we did P’s big party. See…we’re learning! LOL
“Super Bubba’s, Level 6, Blacklight, Mario Mash-Up" party is based off the same format as P’s. We welcome everyone to our home, go over some rules (no running!) and then travel together (in this case through a “warp tube”) to get to our final destination - Super Mario Mash-Up World. We have several stations set up for play, a Mario Kart RC - Rainbow Road area, glow in the dark tic-tac-toe and a coloring station!! (I also have three group activities/games set for us to play, more on that later). One of my favorite things we did for P’s party was have a coloring activity. Since her party was based on Disney's Coco and "dÃa de muertos" I used “print and cut” to print out and cut accurately Day of the Dead masks. Coloring with highlighters in black light is REALLY cool and it was a perfect activity for a Coco party but I was kind of stuck on how to incorporate it for Bubba’s bash.
Long story short, I remembered I had these sticker labels from the pandemic when I was shipping out BRASShole masks and WONDERcovers like crazy. Why not design some Mario stickers for the kids to color and then stick to a lunch bag for them to take their goodies home in…perfect…and inexpensive. I got to work designing a sticker sheet. I had to work around the empty strip in the middle of each label sheet, which thankfully ended up being easy. Every kid has this same sheet of stickers BUT I did take the time to personalize each sheet with two stickers with the party goer’s name. This way they could truly label their bags, or slap that baby on their shirts for immediate glow fun.
I think they turned out great and I love being able to create little touches like this. Even if you didn’t want to spend the time to personalize the sheets (it did add at least two hours of work because the Mario font isn’t really a font but each letter is an individual svg file) allowing kids to get creative in this way is always a neat and easy way to allow those that may need time to warm up to the party, and the possible chaos, the space to do so.
After I printed each sheet I just used the “sticker sheet” preset on my Cameo 3 and they generally cut perfectly. I say "generally" because for the first time ever I had registration errors and calibration mishaps. I was able to print and cut all but 5 sheets flawlessly but I did struggle with a few sheets and I am still trying to figure out why. I went through all the standard troubleshooting processes and the only thing that worked in the end (other than sometimes dumb luck) was MANUALLY registering the marks, something I had never done but I am glad I know and understand how to use now.
It's also important when throwing a blacklight party that you vet (as in try out) every aspect of your event to make sure it does indeed glow or respond to the blacklight. When we threw our Coco party we went through at least five different brand of highlighter before we found the ones we used below. If you look carefully the "S" and "K" in Duke below barely glow, those are the Sharpie brand highlighter. The ones we found that worked the best are the larger markers and they are the generic STAPLES brand markers. In addition to them glowing really well (except for blue but that's pretty much across the board, blue doesn't want to glow...) they are STILL good 5+ years later. That's right, these are the SAME markers we used for the Coco party!! I was ecstatic to discover they were still good!
What do you think? I can’t wait to see how each kid personalizes their bag!
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