Soccer team party

  Last weekend was my first venturing into party design.  Yes, I've held parties before and put up some decorations, but this time I decided to go full "Martha".  It was my son's soccer team's end of the season party.  Their jerseys were orange and black, and their mascot was the tiger, so I decided to go with a black, orange, and white theme.

 
   I used as much soccer paraphanilia I could find (goals, balls, cones, even the team banner we put up at every game.)  Favors bags contained a decorated bag full of orange, white, and black M&Ms and a small soccer ball.  I also made frisbees and personalized visors for every team member.

   For a centerpiece I found some soccer player cake toppers and placed them on a piece of fake turf to simulate a soccer field.  (The fake turf can actually be used for a variety of themes - think flower lollipops poked into it.)

   I covered the water bottle labels with my own label  I made on the computer. There are several free font sites on the internet, and I found the "College" font that I used there.  The straws were also decorated with little tags I made from my computer and stuck to the straws with a soccer ball sticker.

 The banner and the hanging dot decorations behind the table I made out of construction paper and curling ribbon.  Pretty simple - just the cutting of the circles was time consuming.  I'm on the look-out for a large circle punch!
 
   The soccer ball "cake pops" I made following a recipe from Martha Stewart's web site (of course!) They were simply cake crumbled up with enough frosting to make balls, dipped in candy coating, covered with b/w sprinkles, and put on lollipop sticks.  Here's the recipe http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/cupcake-pops .  (Martha's look so much nicer, though.)  If you do decide to make the recipe though, don't tell anyone how many of the "broken" ones you ate.

   Gifts for the coaches were ESPN World Cup preview magazines (perfect timing.)  Most of the supplies that I purchased I found at Michael's.  I also found some very useful clear geometric bowls at Walmart (for a great price) that I used for the cake pops and the M&Ms.  There were many other items I could have used as well that I found including orange and black water bottles (instead of bottled water I used), whistles, black and white coolers to hold drinks, tiger paper plates by Hefty, small plastic tigers that you could glue to napkin rings, orange Gatorade, personalized soccer balls for every guest (or a soccer ball all the kids could autograph for the coaches), and large black and white balloons with orange ribbons, to name a few.