Jamie's 12th birthday

We didn't do a lot at the house for this party because we opted instead to go to the Markham Fair with a group of my daughter's friends, which frankly was a relief because we were only a few days back from England.

The decorations were pretty simple, just an aqua colour theme, a couple of big tissue paper poms and the banner.

Star Wars

      Following closely on the heels of my oldest daughter's birthday in early October is always my son's birthday, which means I'm always working with a pretty tight budget.

    On his 6th birthday my son chose a Star Wars theme for this party (what boy doesn't love Star Wars?) and because of how long the movies have been around there are a plethora of fun items that you can find both online and in stores to accessorize your party with.  However, these items quickly add up which was not helpful to my tight budget so I tried not to go too crazy with themed decorations. I made a few items like the cupcake picks and invitations myself using Star Wars graphics I found online and printed out.
    Little bit of cardstock and glue and voila!  A Star Wars party on a budget!

These were lots of fun to make and a big hit with the kids.  They're made up a jumbo marshmallow stuffed in a mini ice cream cone, then covered in melting chocolate and sprinkles.  Pretty easy to do (once I got the hang of melting the chocolate). I packaged them in individual cello bags and the kids loved them!

 I kept the invitations fairly simple, just downloading a graphic of Yoda from the internet but they were fun!

Fairy Party

I went all out for my daughter's 3rd birthday when we decided to have a fairy party. There were just so many creative possibilities for decorations I could make and games and activities we could do.

I didn't have a specific colour scheme as I do with most of my parties because I wanted it to be a fairy woodland with just riots of colours and lots of different textures and layers.

Naturally as a scrapbooker, I had to make the invitations myself. I wanted to make them fun and fairy like without using the Disney Tinkerbell fairies (although I did incorporate some Tinkerbell fairies in the decorations because I knew this is what the kids would readily recognize, and my daughter really likes Tinkerbell).



Then I got creative with things that I had in my recycling bin. Empty soup containers, empty drinkable yogourt containers, plastic applesauce containers etc. to make various decorations like toadstools, and fallen logs.

I used hot glue to keep the tops and bottoms together, paper mached them and then painted them with acrylic paint.

 The results I think were pretty great considering that it cost nothing and the kids were able to help in the creation of these fun and whimsical decorations. It was a great project to do together!

The log I made from an empty Pringles container.  I rolled some cardboard into a small tube and taped it on for the branch. Paper mached, painted and hotglued some dried moss and a small bird that I bought at the dollar store.  It's hard to tell in this picture but on the log standing upright I also made a small hole in the log and a branch for the bird to perch on.

I made two banners for this party. Once that said Welcome to Fairyland which stretched across the room and one that said Tink's workshop near the table where we would do a lot of the games and activities.

Other things I made included fairy wands which were made of foam stars glued to wooden chopsticks which I painted with glitter glue and hot glued irridescent curling ribbon to.

During the party the girls decorated their fairy wands with glitter, sequins and stickers. 

I  filled the room with hanging paper butterflies and tissue paper poms.

I also found these great wooden miniature birdhouses at my local dollar store unpainted. So I painted them fun colours, covered them in glitter glue to make them sparkle, hot glued a few flowers and butterflies to them and hung them all over the main floor of my house as echanted "fairy houses."

I always like to start a party with an activity that is easy for people to join into at any time (because inevitably not everyone arrives at the same time) and that's easy for a child to "catch up" on later if they show up to the party a little late. And, this also means that small children who get bored quickly aren't sitting around waiting for everyone to arrive before the party can start.

Each child was transformed into a fairy as soon as they arrived. They were given fairy wings, tutus, fairy wands and a crown (these were also what I put in their lootbags at the end) . I also enlisted the help of my oldest daughter, niece and a friend to be the older fairies to help out with activities. I think they had as much fun as the party guests did and they were a big help! 

One of the games that kids of this age love to play is musical chairs so I modified that slightly to fit our fairy party and the fairies played musical lily pads. I cut lily pad shapes out of flattened cereal boxes and did some free hand drawings of water lilies on them to make them pretty. Painted with acrylic paints and weighed them down while they dried so they wouldn't curl and voila! Muscial lily pads! The pond I just cut from a plastic blue disposable table cloth.

Another activity we played was fishing for fairy wishes in the pond. I sandwiched a paperclip in between two flower shapes cut from scrapbook paper and printed a number on each. I then bought a cheap toy fishing rod with magnet on the the end so each child could "fish" for a fairy wish.  The number that they fished out of the pond won them a small prize.

They loved this one! They had to be easy games that 2 and 3 year olds would be able to play. 

Other activities included a find the fairy scavenger hunt, catching bubbles with nets (I had a bubble blower going and while the music played they had to catch as many bubbles with their nets as possible. When the music stopped they had to freeze), and making fairy dough. I pre-made playdough in fun colours and each child was given a couple of colours which they sprinkled with fairy dust (glitter) and then they put this in their lootbags to take home.

The piece de resistance for this party though was definitely the tree. And once again, while I take full credit for the idea, my mind only seems to think in one dimension when creating objects from cardboard whereas my talented out-of-box thinker of a husband made something far more outstanding out of cardboard and blew me away. It was awesome!!

 It's hard to believe that this came out of cardboard and tempra paint. My man is pretty amazing with this stuff!  It really made the living room fun!

I kept the food fairly simple with sandwiches, some cut up fruit and veggies and a few fun things for dessert. 

My mother in law made her butterfly cupcakes, and I placed fairy picks in the cupcakes I made. 

And once I saw the toadstools I just had to try them. They were so cute and turned out really well!

They're made up of raspberries and mini marshmallows. I also coloured some sweetened shredded coconut green for the grass! FUN!

Rebecca's Baby Shower

     As soon as my sister told me she was having another baby (after jumping up and down and congratulating her of course) I was immediately thinking of the baby shower. I had planned a couple of baby showers before but I was eager to try my hand at doing a big event and making a lot of the decorations myself.
     A lot of the decorations that I make are very feminine and girly and what better event to make them for than a baby shower? Thankfully, my sister was all for me planning it and I really went to town on this one!
     It was a lot of work but I've never had more fun! My sister didn't really give me any parameters about what she wanted, but we did know she was having a baby girl so I decided to go really girly and pretty with the decos (lots of flowers and butterflies).  I didn't want to stick with the usual boring baby pastel colour palette though.  The shower was in March and I wanted pretty, but bold, vibrant colours to give it more of an edge so I choose purple, black and white as my theme colours.

   I decided to try my first attempt at a diaper cake. The first diaper cake I saw was made by a friend and presented at a baby shower I attended and I thought it was such a fantastic idea!  For anyone who doesn't know what this is, it's diapers that are rolled up individually and then put together to form the shape of a 2 , 3 or 4 tiered cake. Inside and outside are baby products like baby lotions and shampoos, diaper cream etc.. It's such a great way to give the mom-to-be some much needed baby supplies and diapers in a creative way!
  Once again, I wanted to veer away from a "baby theme" so I just put the baby products (baby lotion, powder, shampoo and diaper cream) inside the layers of the "cake".  The outside I opted to decorate with flowers and ribbon.
   For my first attempt I was pretty pleased with the outcome. I'll put a how-to tutorial on how to make them at another time.

I wanted a personal touch for the give-aways so I started with a tissue paper dahlia that I filled with a small bag of gourmet jelly beans of assorted flavours.  I attached a tag with the date of the shower and then stamped a butterfly on the front.  I made both purple and white and they were so pretty!

!

Another giveaway for our shower guests were the small jars of brazilian fudge. A friend that we used to go to church with has a gourmet fudge business so we had several delicious flavours made for the shower. We gave her our colour palette and she had matched this with a fabric covering for the top of the jars. Each jar also came with a personalized tag and spoon. Check out the link to her website for the Fudgy Truffle.

They were amazing!! Thank you Vanessa! 

http://thefudgytruffle.com/

I also handmade tags for the prizes we gave to the winners of the baby shower games.

The purple and black pattern paper I found at Michael's Craft store and it was the jumping off point for choosing the colour scheme for the rest of the shower decorations.  The patterns is quite bold so I paired it with a light purple cardstock.

The baby shower banner used the same patterned paper. I was worried that the purple and black paper together might be too busy because the print is so bold, but in the end I think they worked well together.

 

On the left are cupcake picks that I made with the patterned paper, different shades of purple cardstock and toothpicks. I also wanted to add some visual interest by using different flower shapes.

On the right, I had to hand cut the butterflies and they were a real pain! The small holes were really difficult and time consuming!
Not sure I would do those ones again, but at least they were pretty!

 These tissue paper poms were one of my favourite things to make. They are so easy to do and have such a great impact. You can make them whatever sizes you want. I put them all over the house for the shower!  I have a link in the Tea Party blog to Martha Stewart's website that gives you a step-by step tutorial, if you would like to try your hand at them.

These smaller tissue paper poms I had decided to hang above the chair for the mom to be, but I would caution against stringing them together ahead of time.  It's a bit more time consuming to do them on location but they got so tangled up together during transport, that I think it would have been easier, and definitely less frustrating to have strung them together and up at my Mom's place.

I bought some flowers from the dollar store in the right colours and just pulled them apart and into the right lengths and placed them in various sized jars to make pretty table accents.

Unfortunately, the lighting was really poor in the house and so a lot of the pictures  were dark and blurry but here are a few that show what the decorations looked like once they were up.

We also had a candy bar for everyone to enjoy during the shower and we encouraged everyone to take a box of treats home.

My lovely sister