My husband and I just held our daughter's 3rd birthday party. She had her heart set on a "Dora the Explorer" theme party, however when we went looking to purchase the coordinating supplies and party favors, they were sold out everywhere so we had to call on our creativity. After searching the web and reading ideas submitted on this site, we were inspired and began planning.  We found the Nick Jr. website to be an invaluable tool as they have an entire Dora the Explorer party planning section on it and we took several ideas from there.  We printed our own invitations using the website template (however, to make them look a little better, we copied and pasted the images to a word document and printed them from there - when printed directly from the website, you get some additional information around the perimeter of the page and it doesn't look as clean). We decorated using purple, pink & yellow streamers twisted together and draped from the ceilings and banisters, coordinating balloons and ribbons, hot pink & yellow plates & napkins with retro-looking flowers on them, confetti, etc. We printed out Dora images from the web, glued them to craft foam, made little stands out of foam for them and placed them around the room to make it more "Dora-ish". We also created a "Map" itinerary with Dora clip art so that the kids could easily see what activity we were doing next and placed them around the house.  We had Dora coloring sheets from the Nick Jr. website (again, copied and pasted to Microsoft Word rather than printed directly from the website for a cleaner look) and individual packs of crayons so that the kids could color while we were waiting for the others to arrive and for snacks we had bowls of chips, nachos and juice boxes.  The first group activity was a "Backpack Adventure" - every child was given their very own backpack to wear, which we made out of purple craft foam (requires two sheets of purple foam per backpack - 1 dark purple, 1 light purple, glued together with hot glue and cinched in a bit at the top to create a tapered effect, shoulder straps cut from purple foam and glued to the back, a flap velcroed to the front and eyes cut from white foam with pupils drawn in black marker, mouth cut from red foam and eyebrows cut from yellow foam). They looked very authentic and the kids loved them.  The "Backpack Adventure" was essentially a treasure hunt throughout the house with clues leading from treasure to clue, clue to treasure.  The clues were simple - eg. "We have to cross CROCODILE LAKE to get to where we'd BAKE A CAKE" and, in the oven was a gift bag with a pair of binoculars for each child's backpack and the next clue which took them somewhere else for either a clue or a treasure.  Other treasures for their backpacks were magnifying glasses, candy necklaces, plastic maraccas (all purchased at a local dollar store) and, at the very end, a "You Did It!" Dora the Explorer Achievement Award (printed from the Nick Jr. website) with each child's name printed on it.  Next we played "Pin the Tail on Boots" - we drew a big picture of Boots on paper, colored it with marker and mounted it on foam backing with a detachable foam tail.  We ordered in pizza and let the kids eat downstairs and watch "Dora Saves the Prince" while the adults ate upstairs. To keep the clean up to a minimum, we served soda in individual sized bottles for the adults and juice boxes for the kids and all of the cutlery, plates, etc. were throw away. We had planned a third game for after the pizza (Dora Bingo, made using a template from a website we found) but we were running behind on time and the kids were really anxious to open presents so we did that next and then brought out an adorable Dora cake that we had made by a local baker. The grand finale was a Sunflower Piñata that we made from paper mache using a template from the Nick Jr. website but we used yellow foam instead of the suggested construction paper for the petals so that they'd stand up better.  This went over really well - we had treat bags inside so that there wasn't an explosion of candy everywhere, just eight little bags tied off at the top, one for each child to take home with them.  Overall, we were really pleased with our Dora party - it was a lot of fun to plan on our own and ended up looking professionally done.  Our little girl and her friends were thrilled!