4th Birthday Fairy Enchantment

For Riley's 4th Birthday, she was quite decided that she was having a fairy birthday party. I was thrilled because I had always wanted to do a fairy party!

Invites
I lucked out at a warehouse sale and found some leaf printed paper invites for super cheap, I think they were 50 for $4! I then printed out in super small fairy sized writing the invitation wording, rolled them up, tied with a bit of tulle & attached a magnifying glass in case the fairy's writing was just too small.

Venue, Decorations & Favors
This time around, this party was done in our house, let's just say it was nice and cozy, which was perfect for an enchanted fairy kingdom. There was a lot of tulle and logs & moss, I wanted a good mix of  fluffy, sparkly things and the natural world. I scavanged borrowed many items from family to use. My aunt has a collection of fairy figurines and had tons of left over tulle from doing her renewal of vows the year before, my good friend had cut down a tree and had tons of logs & small branches. I happened upon perfect purple and lime green sparkly branches & flowers and cute little sparkly butterflies at Michael's after Christmas sale for 70% off!

With the tulle, my niece and I draped it from one end of the room along the ceiling to the other, letting it hang down on each side, trying to make it feel "enchanted" and in a fairy cove. The logs were turned into various elements, from a flower tree to stands for the food.

Never did get a great picture of the tulle hanging, this was at the end of the day as it was starting to fall down.

 

 

I was able to make the Happy Birthday banner from the same paper I made the invitations on, costing me absolutely nothing!

I included favors here, as I used the favors as part of the decorations. I had the coffee table set up with the fairy houses they were to decorate. I originally thought of them gluing on moss, sticks and rocks then thought...um they're 3 &  4 years old, lets make this easy.
I made tutus for the girls. I also wanted to get them fairy wings. Everywhere I checked, online & in stores, were very expensive. I knew that the Dollar Tree had them previously, but couldn't find them now. I went to their website & they had them....in lots of 36 wings. Yeah, definitely didn't need 36 wings. However, when I priced them against purchasing the exact amount I needed, it was about the same. I decided to get them from the Dollar Tree, use extras as decorations then donate the remaining to R's preschool. Worked out great. To top it off, literally, I made simple fairy halo's made from wired garland & curling ribbons and to help with their fairy & gnome magic, we dressed up wands with curling ribbon & jingle bells. For the few boys that were coming, while they were welcomed to dress as fairies if they wanted to, we did have Elf hats (cone party hats spray painted green) and Elf beards that I made from a piece of felt to hook around their ears.
They were also able to pick out & take home one of the flower fairies we made & had used as decoration also.

Fairy house pre decoration along with the fairy wands.

Flower fairies in production

Flower Fairies as decoration

And Flower Fairy as favor

Food
Just as I was able to use the invitation to make the birthday banner, I was also able to use it to make the food lables on the table. We had a wonderful sampling of woodland delights! For the cake, my sister found these adorable cupcake liners & picks, but I ran out of steam in making the cupcakes and sent Mr. to the store to buy some cupcakes. Not wanting the liners to go to waste, I slipped each store bought cupcake into the line & put the picks in them. I did completely fess up to all that they were from a store!

The food table

A close up showing how we used branches, logs river rocks & the fairy figurines

Butterfly sandwiches - PB&J and Chicken Salad

Toadstools - string cheese & tomato halves
*the "plate" was a slate candle holder I had!

Fairy Wands. We drilled holes into the branch to hold the skewers

Twigs & Berries

The Veggie Patch and the Fishing Pond

 
Activities
Since the guests were all 3 & 4 years old, I decided to keep the organized activities to a minimum and just allow time to play.  They got to decorate their fairy houses and my older daughter M read them one of R's favorite books, Camilla the Cupcake Fairy. Meanwhile, my niece painted fairy faces on the children.

Madison reading to the fairies

At the end of the party, I had a happy and very tired birthday girl.

Links to items used or ideas:
Flower Tree, though I ended up cutting my stems too short, was supposed to be like this one
Flower Fairies, possibly my favorite craft for this party, this will tell you how to make them
This blog gave me the inspiration for the rolled invitation.
This blog, karaspartyideas.com gave me the inspiration for the natural aspects of the party, along with the Fairy Wand fruit kabobs
Thank you for stopping by!

Why Hello there...

Missed me? I know, it's been like what...2 years? So, I really kind of suck at this whole blogging thing.

Anyhow, I decided I'm going to try & do this blog thing better and I'm going to start off with some parties. I love throwing them, I love themes (even before the advent of Pinterest) and maybe I can help inspire someone else. At the very least it will help me to relive them! We'll go backwards in time, for the first one we'll do the most recent..

 M's 9th Birthday Sock Hop  

(excuse my mom peakin in the side of this picture...I love parties, I'm no great photographer)

Not sure where we came up with the idea for this one, maybe watching Grease one day? But M was down with the theme from the beginning.

Invite

I originally had grand ideas for the invite, but was running short on time & found cute record invites at the party store on clearance! We have a winner! I did add to the invite, wording around the edge "Pony tails & poodle skirts, cuffed jeans & white t-shirts - the 50's were the time to bop, hope you'll come to the Sock Hop!"

Venue

With having an itty bitty house and 18! children invited, we are quite lucky our good friend Shannon lives in a community with a club house with plenty of room, best of all, besides security deposit it is free of charge! Let me tell you now, while I love to throw a good party, I love a good deal & getting the best bang for my buck!

 Decorations 

We opted for a hot pink and aqua color scheme, with a good dose of silver, black & records thrown in. I got quite a few good ideas on Pinterest along with some of my own. I loved the records that I picked up for .25 - .50 each at the thrift stores, along with the glass straw dispensers from Amazon.

I scored this cd player for free from a friend. Couldn't get to to play, but it looked great with the theme.

 

 

These record bowls were so easy to make!

Arrival

Instead of going with the popular photo booth, we went with a photo "car" as I was lucky & able to get a hold of an old car for the kids to take their picture in front of as they arrived. I later used these pictures as part of their thank you cards.

 Food

I wanted to give the kids the feel of being at a diner, so I made menus that they were able to order from. I donned a pen & pad and took each child's order. I had help from friends & family in the kitchen helping get the orders out. We put the food in food boats instead of paper plates to help add to the diner feel. For dessert, instead of cake, I did "milkshake" cupcakes, using Cool Whip frosting so that it was light like real whip cream but would hold up. I was able to pick up the little glasses at the Dollar store for .59 each

This was unfortunately the only shot of the menu I got. 

Enjoying their "Hound Dogs" and root beer floats

The super popular milkshake cupcakes

 Games

I wanted to keep with the time period so we did Freeze Dance to 50's tunes, Hula hoop contest and a bubble gum blowing contest. Oh yes, we also taught the kids the Hand Jive and an impromptu game of Simon Says started, who am I to argue with Simon Says!

Favors

I used old fashioned cardboard cars from Mel's Diner to put the favors in. I looked around online and they were definitely the cheapest at Mel's, no shipping either! I then filled them with candies that were around in the 50's. Most I was able to find at the Dollar store with a few filled in from Smart & Final. Added to the candy I included the glass from their cupcake!

Thank You Cards

I didn't get a picture of the Thank You cards, but I was pretty impressed with myself. I took all the pictures from the night and using the playlist I already had, put together a slideshow on a dvd for them. Then using the pictures I took of the kids with M in front of the car as they arrived, I used each one of those for the "album" cover, along with the wording "Thank you for coming" and in smaller type "The best hits of January 2013". Slid those into the cd case and had Madison jot a quick note on the inside.

Where I got some of my ideas:

R's Poodle Skirt
Record Bowls I so wanted to do the tiered record platters, but ran into many issues like - most of the records were too floppy to put much weight on & also the cupcakes were too high. Instead I just laid most of the ones planned as tiered platters around on the counter
Milkshake Cupcakes