Moustache Party - part 2

At the end of October we celebrate my oldest daughter, my son and mother-in-law's birthdays altogether with a big family party.  It's a great way to get all the generations together for some food and fun.
I always plan lots of games and activities. It makes for a lot of LOUD CHAOS, but it's just good old fashioned fun!

The theme from Jamie's party continued with moustaches.  I was able to find a package or self-adhesive moustaches of various styles at one of the newly opened Target stores for only $1.00.  I was so excited about that so I put out two packages for people to put on.  They got a bit hot and sweat and uncomfortable after a while, but they were soooo funny on everyone. They made for some great photos!

Also since my son's birthday is on Halloween, our family always dresses up and we encourage our guests to do the same!
 Our family party is not for the faint of heart, but you're sure to leave with your ears ringing, having laughed a lot , and with a belly full of food! :)

We have awesome family that go all out with their costumes and get right into party spirit!

This is grandma and Auntie Amanda posing with my son Aiden.

My three crazy, amazing offspring.

This is our crazy family all dressed up and ready to paaaartaaaay!

 Me and the hubsters.  He's such a good sport and such a big help on pulling these parties together for our families.

My niece showing off one of those awesome self-adhesive moustaches from Target, and Jamie (my daughter)  using one of the moustaches props I made for the photo booth.

Oh man, this makes it all worth while. My DH and son posing with moustache props. This pic made me laugh so hard!

 My beautiful sister and her partner, Aleem being good sports and getting their 'stache on.

You know you married the right man when.... hahahahaha you can rock awesome 'staches together. 

Moustache Party - part 1

We decided to have a moustache themed party for my daughter Jamie's 13th birthday.  Let's just take a moment to let THAT sink in .... a teenager .... in the house.  Can you feel the wave of panic that is rolling over me even as I write this?

Anyway, the month of October was ridiculously full of parties. Since both my oldest daughter and my son have their birthdays in October, and we do smaller scale parties for their friends, and then one big family party for everyone (because my mother-in-law's birthday is in October as well). Which means, we are destined to have October as a month long party for some time (or at least until the kids get too old for birthday parties... and Jamie's 13 and she's still not over it yet (LOL) soooo this may be going on forever!

 To save a bit of my sanity I decided to make the theme for both Jamie's party and the family party a moustache theme. People ask me why moustaches? Well, I don't know... why any party theme? Because it's trendy right now, popular and fun!

My daughter wanted to take her friends to the Markham Fair again (and that was just a whole other debacle when I realized the admission prices for Jamie and her friends went from  $2 last year to $15 this year, per person... whaaaaaat? So then I had to get on entering some art and baking entries into the Markham Fair to get free admission passes. This of course added to my already huge work load, but again the sweat equity was worth the savings in $$ ...which is also why I make most of my decorations)  But I digress!!

Alright enough blabbing, here are some of the pictures from the party.

I made the loot bags. Pretty simple white paper bags, which I just glued the paper scalloped shaped medallion to, and then a simple moustache over that. The theme colours were teal, white and black.

Each girl got a bottle of Jones soda, in either blue raspberry lemonade or blue bubblegum flavour. I peeled the Jones soda labels off and printed my own moustache themed labels.  I had 3 different labels,  I  (heart graphic) love (moustache graphic) moustaches , Keep Calm and Stache on and  Wet your whiskers.

 They also got a moustache straw (which I made by cutting moustache shapes out of black cardstock and then hole punching in the centre and inserting a regular bendy straw), a moustache eraser, a moustache sugar cookie, caramel popcorn,  and a sparkly moustache ring, which I purchased from a local party supply store.

 I also found these great moustache buttons online with various moustache names, which I thought were hilarious, so I made a whole list of moustache personalities (or 'stache-onalities) and asked the girls to pick one, and use that as their name for the rest of the party.
I was "petit handlebar"!

This is the area where the girls had a bunch of different moustaches they could choose from to glue onto their Keep Calm and Stache on picture frames. The plan is to send them photos from the photobooth taken with the birthday girl, rocking various moustaches. I also gave them some teal coloured glitter ('cause everything is better with glitter am-I-right ladies), and silver and teal sequins.

It's hard to see, but on the table on the right in the corner you can get a glimpse of the moustache cupcake picks I made. Unfortunately, I got so caught up in the party prep I forgot to get a better picture. Alas and alack, this seems to be my downfall.

The lighting isn't great, but the banner across the front read "Stache Bash"

For anyone familiar with my blog you'll know that the tissue poms are pretty standard at parties for me. They just bring such fun and festivity to the room, they're easy and inexpensive and a great way to pull all the theme colours together.  I also made a Happy Birthday Banner with cardstock.  I didn't put a specific age on this one because I wanted to re-use it for the family party at the end of the month.

My husband made this awesome frame for our photobooth out of black bristol board. And this is me being an idiot as we tried to set the camera tripod at the right height.  We attached with fishing line to a moveable coat rack that adjusted up and down and was on wheels. This was handy because it was easy to move out of the way when we needed  the space.

The photobooth was just so much fun! I made all the photo booth props from black cardstock. I printed a few templates from the internet and set to it with a pair of scissors. I then painted some disposable wooden chop sticks and hot-glued them to my carstock staches! 

I also added a few funky sunglasses and a couple of colourful boas from Dollarama as some additional fun photo-booth accessories.  It was a blast posing for pics and we had a lot of laughter with this activity.

We also took our moustaches to the Markham Fair and I had the girls pose in various locations around the Markham Fair with their moustaches.  We even asked police officers and paramedics at the fair to pose with us.  I wish I could post those photos, but I don't have permission from the girl's parents, so alas, I'm sticking to the ones of my own family.! :)  We had a great day, and Jamie really enjoyed her party , so I called the day a success! 

Cecilia's baby shower

My cousin was expecting her first baby in March of 2013,  and I was happy to organize and do the decorations for her baby shower.  ( I say "was expecting" because I am so late in posting this that her beautiful baby girl is almost 5 months old now. Lol. Well better late than never).  I LOVE doing baby showers, they are just so much fun!

This post is purely about the decorations.  Once again, I didn't have our proper camera so the only pics I got were sort of bad lighting and taken with my i-phone. -sigh- I've got to get into the habit of bringing our DLSR camera to events. But it's just so BIG and bulky!  Such a pain once you're not snapping pics. And, I find I'm often scrambling to put up the decorations and organize all the activities that I don't have time to take photos. Alas, when I'm rich and famous I'll have to hire a professional photographer! :)  Until then, the blog-osphere will have to put up with my crappy iphone pics.

Anyway,  I tried something totally new with this one.  I made sugar cookie baby feet for giveaways for all the shower attendees, and used a piping/ flood icing technique I had just learned via Pinterest. (Can you tell I'm a pinterest addict!!??!!)

I think they turned out pretty well for my first try.  I did struggle with the dots for the toes. Getting them the right consistency and without air bubbles was a bit tricky at first but eventually I got the hang of it.

I made a diaper cake as my gift to the mom-to-be and as you can probably tell I chose pinks and white to be the theme colours. Classic but fun.

 These were the other baby shower favours that we gave to everyone at the baby shower. Tissue paper dahlias filled with gourmet jelly beans.

I handmade the tags using pink cardstock and small baby feet punches
















Surrounding the diaper cake I made an area for all the shower attendee's to write a message to the baby for future (and to give the parents a few laughs in the meantime.)  I also had small card stock hearts that people could write advice to the expectant parents. They could then hang their message on the lines in between the paper diaper shirts, for the duration of the shower, but the hearts could also easily be placed in baby's photo album or scrapbooks as momentos.

This is the butterfly mobile I made to hang above the mom-to-be's chair.

Here's a closer look at the baby shower banner and the diaper shirt banner.

It's hard to see but in the diaper shirt banner, all the diaper shirts had rhinestone buttons and made them super cute!

The games were a whole different thing, and I could probably fill a whole other blog just about those, so I'll leave it for now.  It was a pretty and girly baby shower that I think everyone had a good time at. So that's it for this post, all the ideas are simple and easy to replicate but pull together to make a fun and memorable shower. I hope this served to inspire.