Disney Cars Party - Part 2: Party Details/Activities & Free Printables

I hope you enjoyed Part 1 of Jake's Cars party.  Today I'm going to show you what we did to keep the kids busy.  We live in a townhouse so we had planned to have a park party since we have limited space.  Then the weather report was calling for rain so at the last minute we scrambled to relocate the party to our place.  Of course it ended up being a beautiful sunny day, but in the end I'm glad we had the party at home and everything turned out great. 

We had several different stations set up in different areas of the downstairs and we also used our garage for a lot of the party.  The family room had Cars coloring pages and stickers for the kids to use while their parents were getting them their food since 3-year-olds aren't exactly known for patience.

Jake has a lot of Cars toys so once we relocated to our house, we put a bunch of those toys out.

Puzzle book, Memory game, Playmat with mini cars

In the kitchen we had our first themed station: Ramone's Body Art.  This was just a bunch of Cars temporary tattoos (with a Cars washcloth to apply them of course).

Free Printable: Ramone's Body Art Sign

Jake has this race track that you can build lots of different ways and it comes with a jeep that drives by itself.   We named it Smisko Speedway since that is our last name.  On the printable, I deleted our last name so you can fill in whatever you want or just leave it as Speedway.

 

Free Printable: Speedway Sign

Luigi's Tire Toss: About a month before the party I needed to replace two of my tires so we hung onto the old tires.  Then my mom used a Cars fabric to make some Mater and Lightning bean bags.  We had planned to have this at the park but it worked in our garage perfectly well.  The big Cars picture behind the game is something Josh ran out to Party City the night before and bought to make it look a little more festive in our garage.

Free Printable: Luigi's Tire Toss

The main event was a box car race with each car decorated to look like a character from Cars.  I'm not going to lie, I started working on these the October before the party (it was in January).  They weren't hard, but they did take some time.  First I made the cars, then I painted them the main color.  After that I decorated the sides to look the way they do in the movies (I borrowed Jake's toys to work from).  I cut construction paper to make the eyes.  Because art is not my strong suit, one of the teachers at my school who was an art major in college, graciously agreed to help me and made the rest of the faces on all of the cars.  They turned out amazing.  Finally I made a "license plate" for each car with the character's name to put on the back.  

I have photos of the different sides of each car and would be happy to go into more details of how I made them if you are interested.  Just email me.

As I mentioned, it turned out to be a beautiful day so we had adults stand at either end of our street (we live in a gated complex with minimal traffic) and let the kids race.  They liked it so much that we ended up having lots of rounds.

To protect the privacy of our guests I blurred out their faces.

Of course no house party is complete in Jake's eyes without a pinata so we had a Lightning McQueen one to cap off the games.

Each guest received a personalized Cars coloring book that I made by downloading free coloring pages (just google printable Cars coloring pages) and then adding word art to the cover to put each child's name.  I then put a piece of cardstock as the last page to make them a little sturdier and bound them using the machine we have at my school.  The little bags (found at 99 cent store) had a Cars cup, Cars pencil, crayons, and Cars candy.

I hope that this party will inspire you the way so many other people's parties inspired me.  Feel free to contact me with any questions.  By the way, I have a Mac so if when you download the printables the formatting seems off, let me know and I will try to fix it on my husband's PC.  I never know what is going to transfer over correctly from Mac to PC.

I'm linking up with Best of the Weekend, Link Party Palooza, Thrifty Thursday, Suburbs Mama, and Strut Your Stuff Saturday