Mario Brothers hat and Princess Peach Crown

For my son's 7th Birthday, we had a Super Mario Brothers' theme.  I wanted to keep party costs down (gosh, can birthday parties get expensive really quickly if you're not careful!) and I'm not a fan of junky party trinkets for guests.  Since we were going to have less than a dozen kids, I wanted to make each guest something to wear.  At first, I tossed around the idea of some kind of shirt using freezer paper stencils, but ultimately decided on hats/crowns for each guest.  I found some great tutorials online and I was really pleased with how they turned out.  While they did take a little bit of time (especially the crowns), they were really inexpensive and relatively easy to make.

Birthday boy, Mario, and his sister, Princess Peach!

For the Mario hats, I used this awesome tutorial that I found HERE.  They were surprisingly simple to make.  The only change I made from the tutorial was on the white circle.  Instead of using fun foam, I cut a circle of white fleece, traced and cut out the "M", and hot-glued it in place.  (*NOTE* When I polled the kids prior to the party, all the boys wanted to be Mario, but you could easily use green fleece to make a Luigi hat as well!)

The Princess Peach crowns were definitely more time consuming (and it figures that we were going to have twice as many girls as boys at the party!)  I ended up sewing all the pieces and layers together.  I probably could have just used hot glue, but I figured the girls would be more likely to use the crowns more often as dress up and I wanted them to be sturdy.   For the basic crown design, I used the pattern and tutorial found HERE.  Then, I used the Princess Peach crown shown HERE , to inspire our decorations.  The only other changes I made were to use yellow flannel instead of the felt to cover the elastic in back and to use some sparkly, sequin-y fabric for the "jewels" on the crown.

I was so pleased with the way they both turned out!  The kids wore them for the whole party and looked so cute.

All of our Marios and Princess Peaches!