Hosting a Gruffalo themed birthday party!

I've blogged about the Gruffalo before but my family LOVE him! It was the first book I bought Elliot and our little obsession has grown from there really. Not a day goes by when we don't either read the book or watch the film, and Elliot can usually be found wearing some kind of Gruffalo tshirt!

We decided to throw a party for Elliot's 2nd birthday and having seen lots of cool ideas on Pinterest, I decided to theme it around the Gruffalo story. Pinterest is brilliant for party ideas and I wasted many an evening looking at pictures of other Gruffalo parties!

The official Gruffalo website has lots of ideas for parties and even have invitations you can print out and customise but I decided to buy some ready made invites from Amazon which were really cute.

Food is always important at any party and I wanted the buffet to be Gruffalo themed too. Obviously we weren't going to be eating roasted fox or scrambled snake (tasty!) but I chose things that with a little imagination could pass as their Gruffalo counterparts! I made a big list of the foods we would be having and basically matched it up to an item from the story - for instance, roasted fox became chicken dippers and poisonous warts were green grapes! I downloaded Gruffalo character pictures from the internet and stuck each one to a little bit of card which had the food name written on it. They weren't as fancy as some of the food labels I'd seen on Pinterest but they did the job and they actually looked pretty good on the day!

For the birthday cake I found some amazing creations but to be honest, I didn't really want to pay out £50+ for something that would get chopped up and put in party bags! In the end my mum found a really nice personalised Gruffalo cake topper on Etsy and she bought a large plain cake from Asda to stick it on. She added a Gruffalo ribbon and chocolate fingers round the edge and it looked really nice, and worked out much much cheaper than the ones I originally looked at.

At the last minute we decided it might be fun to hire a Gruffalo costume out to meet Elliot and his friends and we managed to find a UK based company who did costume hire by post. The costume itself was really well made and looked very authentic, not like some of the homemde Gruffalo's I've seen online!! The company is called Fairy Godmother and their website is definitely worth a visit if you're in need of a Gruffalo costume! We did give Elliot a sneak preview of the Gruffalo (or my husband!) and his reaction was so funny, I really wished I'd recorded it! He gasped and put his hands to his face and you could tell he literally couldn't believe his eyes! He did say he was a bit scared but couldn't wait to tell his Grandparents that he'd seen the Gruffalo! 

Every Gruffalo needs a cave so we managed to put together a very last minute creation that consisted of our gazebo, some camouflage netting and a couple of cheap Christmas trees! We did intend to collect lots of leaves to go in there but the weather has been pretty grotty recently and the leaves were just too soggy. We positioned the "cave" next to the door to another room so my husband could pop in there and change and come out as the Gruffalo! 

The party went so well and Elliot and his friends looked very cute dressed up in their Gruffalo outfits. We had a prize for the best costume and Elliot's little friend Willow won this - she was wearing a homemade owl costume made by her mummy and she looked brilliant! 

Here's a selection of pics from the party :) 

Elliot, me, Mum, Dad and my sisters Sarah and Laura :)