My daughter turned 10 this month. She's a real tomboy and most of her friends are boys, so the normal preteen girl birthday themes were definitely out. She asked for a Teddy Scares birthday this year. For those not familiar with Teddy Scares, they are teddy bears that have been discarded by their owners. They live in a landfill and dream of seeking revenge on their owners! They're made by Applehead Factory we've bought their stuffed bears at Hot Topic, and we get their comic books at the local comic shop. Not exactly your average teddy bear birthday party, but a perfect theme for a bunch of ten year old boys!  And my goal was to incorporate art into the party wherever I could because all of her friends love to draw.  For invitations I used Photoshop to place my daughter, wearing a Teddy Scares t-shirt, next to one of the bears, Redmond Gore (her favorite). The front reads Come to My Birthday Party and on the inside, another bear says Or else! You'll miss a great time�. We live pretty far from the school area, amazingly out of sixteen kids only one couldn't make it (he was sick). The biggest challenge was developing a theme party that takes place in a junkyard! Fortunately, I started shopping right after Halloween and found perfect party favors. Target had a line of Halloween products called Edgar & Ellen all 75% off! We found Barrels of Slime that looked just like trash bins with black slime inside! I'm sure the parents were thrilled when they brought THAT home, but it was definitely a hit. We also found body part chocolates, Petri dishes full of gross gummi shapes with plastic tweezers, and wind-up rats. Perfect junkyard favors! I couldn't give every child an actual Teddy Scares stuffed animal, but we got posters, postcards, stickers and mini-comics from Teddy Scares (www.teddyscares.com) and the kids loved them, especially the comic books! Each child, upon arriving, got a plain brown lunch bag (nothing fancy in a junkyard!). They wrote their name and a number on the bags. The number kept track of arrivals, because we hired a local caricature artist to do a caricature of each child. It was amazing to see rambunctious 10-year old boys sit so still and look so serious!  It was a GREAT idea to put numbers on the favor bags if you need kids to do things in turn, it's so hard to remember names and without an order everyone would have been clamoring to be next! We came up with some great junkyard themed games  they needed to work indoors since December can get so cold! I found some disgusting soup can labels online called Looney Labels with titles like Roadkill Ravioli and Mealworm Marinara. We taped them over soda cans and set ten of them up on shelves. We painted yellow ping-pong balls to look like eyeballs (a repeating homage to one of her favorite Teddy Scares, Cyrus the Cyclops). Kids took the eyeballs and a slingshot from a local sports store and aimed for the cans. Definitely the favorite game at the party, I don't think any of the kids had ever seen a slingshot! We also made felt versions of the Teddy Scares on a poster board for another ping-pong ball game. We used adhesive Velcro tabs on the balls for kids to toss the balls at the bears.  Another favorite game was an indoor version of egg toss we called Rotten Egg Toss. I used a needle to dig out a small hole on one end of the egg and a larger hole on the other end. The technique is called egg blowing because you blow the insides out through the larger hole, then rinse with water, dry and decorate. But instead of decorating them, I simply stuffed them to the gills with gummi worms and taped them shut with white surgical tape. The kids had no idea what would happen when they cracked open!   We also made bingo cards appropriately title T-R-A-S-H instead of BINGO. We made them in Powerpoint with images of the bears and items you'd find in a dump garbage trucks, seagulls, slime, etc. We used more discounted Halloween novelties as markers: tiny ants, spiders and flies! It was a great quiet game to mix with the mayhem. The other quiet activity was definitely the highlight. T-shirt painting! My brother, who is an automobile airbrush artist, agreed to airbrush t-shirts for the kids. I cut out stencils resembling heaps of garbage, with old automobiles and trash cans and a stencil of a bear. We used opaque fabric airbrush paint and he gave each black t-shirt a junkyard background and left a blank bear-shaped area in front. We gave the kids fabric paints and brushes and clipped a cardboard base behind each bear silhouette so they could design their own Teddy Scare�. We had so many artists and so many bear creations! My favorite was a Santa bear with a chainsaw!  We served pizza, enjoyable and easy! As entertainment during the food we played the Teddy Scares animated short (you can find it on YouTube). It's a great not-too-scary film created at The Dave School (an animation and visual arts school) with help from some names you might even recognize: Clive Barker, Linda Blair?  For snacks we offered chips and salsa and the school-fuel Chex mix recipe from the Chex website. We used a Wilton bear face pan to make two of the Teddy Scare bears into cakes. I found bug-shaped candles for the cakes and eyeball plates and napkins. We used green and black plastic tablecloths, utensils, balloons and streamers and of course littered the floor with plastic rats from Halloween!  The kids had a great time and there were enough activities to keep them busy the entire three hours, no small feat considering the attention span of kids these days! My daughter was thrilled and I'm happy to say none of the kids were upset they had to go to a girl's birthday party!