The Stupids Have Ideas for your Doctor Who Party

Yes, I am shamelessly taking advantage of the upcoming announcement of the twelfth Doctor to write this post.  We’ve had a couple of Doctor Who parties for the kids, and have amassed some do-able ideas that you can throw together for cheap.

I apologize for the poor quality of the photos.  This is due to me being a bad photographer, and too lazy to send them to the other computer that has editing software.

 REFRESHMENTS

First, here is what I do not recommend:  Assembling a TARDIS cake when you are feeling under the weather.

I made a triple recipe of cake in two rectangular pans, cut it into squares, and stacked them on each other.  Then I stuck wooden coffee stirrers down through to keep it from tilting.  Then I panicked a little bit, and stuffed a folded up paper plate under one corner to keep it from collapsing.  Then I took this picture, and then it collapsed.

But maybe you’d have better luck!  My one tip is:  the light on top is a gum drop.  Oh, and the windows are tin foil.  Ta dah!

My other son also wanted a Doctor Who cake for his birthday, but, with the above cakeatory triumph fresh in his mind, he requested a simple sheet cake with a chocolate Dalek drawn on it.  It wasn’t anything spectacular

but I can tell you that Junior Mints make very serviceable Dalekanium bumps.  They are squishable, for perspective.

I think we actually just went with the kids’ favorite foods for these parties, but if you want to go Full Doctor, you could have:

Fish sticks and custard

Bow Tie Pasta Salad

Bananas.  (Always bring a banana to a party.)

And there are actually two books of Doctor Who recipe ideas:  Dining With the Doctor:  The Unauthorized Whovian Cookbook and The Doctor Who Cookbook.  I have no idea if they’re any good.

DECORATIONS

Lady Cassandra on the door.  This decoration uses some of my favorite media:  plastic tablecloth from the dollar store, and markers.

Get a tablecloth, drew a face and some veins on it, cut the edges to look like stretched out skin, and tape it to the front door.  This weeds out any guests who are still not sure about being your friends.

Face of Bo Aquarium.  Everyone was about as impressed as the fish was by this particular decoration.

If the printer had been working, I would have printed out a color image and taped that to the back of the aquarium, but I had to draw it.  It’s surprisingly hard to draw a realistic picture of an unrealistic-looking special effect.

Hand in a jar centerpiece.

I forgot to do this one, but I was planning to get a rubber glove (maybe you have one for washing dishes, or they sell them in packs in the pharmacy department), draw fingernails and knuckles on it, inflate it, and float it in a jar of blue water for a centerpiece.  The glove would have to be full of something heavier than water, though, so it wouldn’t just bob to the top; and it would have to be sealed very well so it wouldn’t leak into the jar.  Maybe fill it with cooked oatmeal?  Maybe this is why I didn’t get around to this one.

Dalek and TARDIS wall coverings.  Again the dollar store plastic tablecloths (blue for the TARDIS and yellow for the Dalek) and the permanent marker.  The TARDIS is pretty easy to draw, being mostly right angles.   Daleks are a little trickier, and I was happy to palm the job off on my eight-year-old son:

You could hang them on the wall or use them as door coverings — especially the TARDIS.

Star danglers.  Our Dollar Tree has three-packs of gold and silver foil stars dangling from spirals, like these:

I bought tons of these and tacked them all over the ceiling.  My main goal in decorating for parties is to distract from the true state of the house, and these did the trick.  They also nearly put some of the taller guests’ eyes out, but in an awesome, time vortex-y way.

Last but not least, I gave each kid some sidewalk chalk and told them to write BAD WOLF on everything they could find, inside and out.

Or, you could draw it on every surface before the kids get there, and use it as a scavenger hunt:  whoever finds the most BAD WOLFs wins a prize.

If you were really ambitious, you could turn your Barbie doll into a Weeping Angel.  This could make a fantastic cake topper.  Or you could just grow your own Weeping Angels:

ACTIVITIES

Make Your Own Adipose Guy.  We showed the kids a short clip of the Adipose episode on my husband’s laptop, and then passed out marshmallows, mini marshmallows, toothpicks, and black markers.

Some of the kids went ahead and ate them.  I haven’t heard from anyone’s lawyer, so I’m assuming they removed the toothpicks and digested the ink without any trouble.

Weeping Angel Race.  This is sort of like “Red Light, Green Light.”  Again, we showed them a clip from the show, for the benefit of kids who weren’t familiar with Weeping Angels.  The person who’s it is the Doctor, and everyone else is a Weeping Angel.  The Doctor closes his eyes and yells, “Go!” and everyone can run (or sneak):

As soon as he opens his eyes, he yells, “Stop!” and anyone who’s caught moving is out.  Whoever gets all the way up to the Doctor wins.

Cyberman Tag.  Again with the video clips.  (I like to break up parties into short segments, so the kids don’t get too restless.  It also helps me pace things, so we don’t run out of time and end up still eating cake when the parents arrive.)  One person is the Cyberman, and he tags people by clamping his hand on their shoulder like Cybermen do.  They scream and fall down, and then they’re on his side.  Last person to avoid being upgraded wins.

PARTY FAVORS

Bowties. 

Directions here, except instead of hairclips, we glued on bar pins (we found ours in the craft aisle of Walmart).  This is the only part I really spent money on.  It requires heavy fabric, a glue gun and hot glue, and bar pins.   It was time consuming, and we had to experiment a bit to make them come out the right size; but they held up very well, and were popular.

Masks and other printables.  Scroll down on this BBC site to find some Ood and Weeping Angel masks you can print out, as well as coloring pages, a cover to make a River Song diary, etc.

Papercraft.  Again, our stupid printer wasn’t working, otherwise I would have made a bunch of these papercraft TARDISes to fill with candy as party favors.

Okay, that’s about it!  The only thing that was missing from our parties is this guy:

Probably just as well.