Shopkins Party

Face painting can add fun to a themed party. It's awesome if all the guests get animal faces for a jungle party, or fairy designs for a girl's tea party. Most birthday parties we do have a theme, but usually the guests choose their favorite design from our poster, regardless of the theme. Every once in awhile, though, we get a party where the face painting and the theme really come together.

Recently, I did a birthday party for a seven-year-old girl, and the theme was Shopkins. We're happy to do custom designs to go with your theme, and I'll usually paint the designs ahead of time, so that guests can see their options. The birthday girl's mom let me know her favorite Shopkins characters, and I did some designs to add to my menu board. Surprisingly, most of the 18 girls at the party chose one of the Shopkins designs, which was a lot of fun. The characters are super cute, so it was fun for me as a face painter to enhance the theme that way.

I was also very impressed with this party. I attend a lot of birthday parties, and I'm often blown away by the effort made by moms and dads to do themed food, games, favors, etc. and basically make sure that their child's guests have an awesome time. But this party was especially impressive to me because the games were a lot of fun and all went along with the Shopkins theme. One game I thought was great was a balloon toss. The guests were split up into groups of four or five and given a balloon to keep in the air while music played. When the music stopped, the last guest to have touched the balloon had to pop it and find a piece of paper inside. On the paper was written something silly the guest had to do, like sing a song in a funny voice, act like an animal, do a dance, etc. The girls all enjoyed seeing who would have to pop the balloon and what ridiculous action they had to do.

My favorite part of the party, though, was the way the hose did prizes and favors. Usually with party games there is either no prize, or a small extra prize for the winner, and then all the guests go home with favors. But at this party, every game had several winners who received "Shopkins Bucks" as their prize. For example, the balloon popper got $100 Shopkins Bucks. At the end of the party, there was a big table laid out with prizes (both big and small) for different dollar amounts. The girls got to "go shopping" with their Shopkins Bucks to choose their favors. Each girl ended up with two or three large prizes, or several smaller prizes.

I thought that was such a fun way to do things at a party, because it made the girls really excited about winning each game, but it worked out so that everyone had about the same amount of Shopkins Bucks to spend, and they all got prizes they were happy with. What a fun idea!