Today is Hello Kitty's birthday :D didn't you know?! Haha, don't worry we didn't either until about a month ago when we were planning this bow-tastic birthday party set up! Truth be told, we've never been into many character things at all. Even as children, neither Malissa or I (or any of our siblings for
I want to LITERALLY hire one of these women to come to my house and do this for Liam. I do not have the time, energy, or creativity to put this together. I am DYING.
If Lisa Frank is your jam, then you're seriously not going to know what to do with yourself when it comes to this rad, colorful, unicorn...
Barbie Party Ideas and Barbie party Freebies
We're head over heels in love with the watercolor wedding trend. There are so many beautiful ways to incorporate this theme into any event, especially a baby shower! These 20+ Watercolor Baby Shower Ideas are perfect for a fun, modern, and artistic shower that will wow guests and leave people talking long after the baby
Planning a baby shower? Sprinkle baby shower is the hottest trends and here is how to pull it off.
watercolor art, and how to create your own with a few simple tips and tricks.
Let's have a Minecraft birthday party! Minecraft is a creative world game. The player breaks blocks and places new blocks in a three-dimensional environment.
Children collaborate to make a giant painted birthday banner from paper, black sharpies, and neon watercolors.
STYLISH RETRO Pink Flamingo Pool Party with an ombre pink cake ball tower, soft blue printables, umbrella & lei photo booth props & ice cream
a few ideas for a painting birthday party. watercolor birthday inspiration.
A beautiful brunch spread looks time-consuming, but it doesn't have to be. Learn the art of proper prep and host a fancy brunch without losing sleep.
Children collaborate to make a giant painted birthday banner from paper, black sharpies, and neon watercolors.
Looking for a sweet birthday party theme? Check out this donut birthday party for a sweet and savory celebration!
If Lisa Frank is your jam, then you're seriously not going to know what to do with yourself when it comes to this rad, colorful, unicorn...
As I’m writing this, I think we’re supposed to have ice again tomorrow, which will be Friday. As in, it will probably just be miserably cold, and then Carol will call, which is the Williamson County school system way of letting us know that school will be canceled. Wheeeee! I offically need a wine glass...Read the Post
Sharing Blakely's Sprinkle Party from decorations to treats and all the sprinkle themed ideas in between! Get all the tips and tricks from Courtney Whitmore
I threw a backyard s'mores party for my sister's birthday, and years later, we're all still talking about it.
Last year I threw my darling little sister the most legit Warrior Cat Birthday Party in all the land. This year I hoped to throw her another fun, unique, and challenging soiree. I presented her with the idea for a Palindrome Party in honor of her 11th birthday--a palindrome in and of itself. I even want so far as to design a palindrome-heavy invitation in a sophisticated but fun color scheme. But no. She wanted a luau. An eleventh birthday luau. An el-uau, if you will. I was not happy with her generic choice of birthday theme, but it was her birthday after all. So I obliged... Luau Party Decor Ideas I started the party planning with a "trip" to Oriental Trading. As you might expect if you've frequented this site, there was plenty of selection. But I wanted to avoid to a certain extent things that looked too much like they came from a party store. I steered clear of inflatable items (okay except for one inflatable pig cooler that ended up being so huge that we put it in the pool and it sat 3-4 eleven year old easily) and swirly cutouts meant to hang from a ceiling. In an effort to deviate from typical luau patterns I bought most of the paper good (napkins, plates, banners, and lanterns) in a brightly colored ikat print reminiscent of a tribal/island motif. Additional paper lanterns in pineapple and blue/green patterns were also purchased to extend the color scheme. The "Get Tropical" station greeted our eleven year old guests upon arrival. Baskets of colorful pint-sized grass skirts, clip-in hair flowers, and leis from Oriental Trading were arranged in baskets I found lying around the house. The little chalkboard was from Zulilly and the table top tiki totem torches were found, of all places, at the grocery store (Giant). The tropical print tablecloth was picked up from Home Goods for under $15. In addition to taking home their hula girl ensembles, each girl also took home a beach ball and a personalized pineapple cup, both from Oriental Trading. Grass table liners in green and tan were purchased for the food and beverage tables from Oriental Trading. Because the food would be outside in June, screened food covers were a necessity. I found cute pink and green covers in a tropical motif by Cynthia Rowley at Home Goods for about $12 each. Luau Party Decor DIYs Because my little sister is nearing that age where all things teenager are fascinating, I knew from the beginning I wanted to up the cool factor of her party by adding in a Selfie Station. Her circle of friends are all already toting their own cell phones, so this was a big hit. Had it been a slightly older crowd, I would have also posted up a hashtag for them to share their photos with on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The bamboo-look sign was from Oriental Trading. These giant flowers added a major impact to the selfie station and the decor in general. They were relatively easy to make and inexpensive...but definitely took some time. I used this tutorial to create them: Giant Tissue Flower DIY. I purchased a styrofoam wreath and colorful paper drink umbrellas in bulk from Oriental Trading to make this umbrella wreath. Added bonus: it looked cute hanging on my front door for the rest of the summer. I'm sure you could find a tutorial on how to do this somewhere, but you don't really need one. Just shove umbrellas all over this styrofoam ring and you're done. Like the tabletop tiki totem lanterns, these larger stake versions were also found randomly at my local grocery store (Giant). I mentioned these pineapple cups from Oriental Trading earlier. I googled "luau font" and used paint pens to write the names of each of the girls on their own personalized cup. This cake was my absolute favorite thing about this party. My sister, as usual, wanted an ice cream cake. This meant there was not a whole lot I could do ahead of time to decorate. Whatever I did would need to be done pretty quickly. I purchased one large can of pirouette cookies, cut them diagonally different lengths, and lined the outside of the plain white cake with them to look like bamboo stalks. I then added the cut off top of a pineapple and some colorful Hawaiian silk flowers (from Oriental Trading). Using the same luau lettering from the pineapple cups, I wrote on the top with a tube of green icing. It took about 20 minutes, including time to cut the cookies (which I did ahead of time). Luau Party Food Ideas "Flip flops" were made by drawing with icing tubes on Nutter Butters. Could NOT be easier! Pig (in a blanket) Roasts were just hot dogs wrapped in crescent roll dough. Silk flower picks from Oriental Trading (the same ones I used on the cake) were stuck in the tops. This pineapple dip did not turn out so well for me (I think I added too much pineapple juice?), but I was able to salvage it with plain gelatin. Despite the struggle, the end product tasted fine and looked really cute. I got the recipe here: Pineapple Cream Cheese Spread These candy kabobs were purchased from Oriental Trading. Pool noodles: aka Twizzlers (and similar Twizzler-like candy). Floaties: aka sour gummy peach rings. The Hawaiian flower picks for the cheese were purchased, you guessed it, from Oriental Trading. Leftover paper umbrellas from the wreath were used to decorate the food tags. For "real food" we served hot dogs and kabobs. Beverages were an assortment of fruit punches and lemonades. Guests mixed all the drinks together to create "Hurricanes." The tiki covered cabana was also from Oriental Trading. Luau Party Fun & Games Because this party was held at a home with a pool, swimming was an obvious choice of activities for this fête. Guests also enjoyed a few rounds of Limbo. I'd advise against using a pool noodle as your limbo stick, but eleven year olds thought this was the best choice. The most fun was probably had with the sack races. Any sack would do, of course, but these luau themed sacks from Oriental Trading were just as inexpensive as the rest of 'em so I figured we might as well. For all my meticulous planning, I completely spaced on game prizes... and believe me when I say these kids expected to be compensated for their wins. Luckily, in addition to throwing a mean children's party, I'm also great at bluffing. I told them the pineapples (that were picked up from the grocery store) were specifically imported from Hawaii for my sister's "Special Day" and that comparable pineapples could not be found anywhere else in this time zone. It worked.
Sharing Blakely's Sprinkle Party from decorations to treats and all the sprinkle themed ideas in between! Get all the tips and tricks from Courtney Whitmore
Look who turned 8 last week! He was SO excited - and who can blame him? Birthdays are exciting, especially when you are looking forward to a party with a bunch of your new friends and one with the theme of your favorite game to boot. Yup - Tyler, like many kids right now, is completely obsessed with Minecraft. I have to admit I know very, very little about Minecraft, nor was I really in the mood to sit down and play the game with the kids. So I relied pretty heavily on looking at ideas online with one of the kids at my side making comments. It was kind of a fun process actually. Tyler had lots and lots and lots of ideas. ;) And Kaitlyn is great about helping me pull it all together. In the end, we decided on the following: Creeper Rice Krispie Treats went to school with Tyler for all of his classmates. We just tinted the marshmallow green and the eyes are chocolate chips which I melted and piped onto wax paper to form the eyes and mouth. Once the birthday boy was off to school I got to work on the cake. He had requested a TNT cake, which seemed as easy as stacking a few cake squares on top of each other and covering it with red. Uh huh. Yeah. First ever epic cake fail. It started leaning after I got all the layers on and even with additional support, it had toppled before I could get the exterior frosting on it. I had to laugh. Really, what can you do but laugh? And my brother, who was eating breakfast at the time, laughed at me too - and asked if he could "publicly humiliate" me by posting a photo on Facebook. I told him that was fine, because I fully intended to blog about it ;) So what do you do when your cake falls apart and you don't want to run to the store? I turned it into Dirt Cake, that's what. The kids didn't have a clue - ha! In fact, they loved it. Couldn't get enough of the cake in the cups with the Minecraft toppers I printed at the last minute (found here). The rest of the food was pretty easy. Tyler had been pretty quick to suggest a bunch of foods that were in the game: "bread" was sandwiches cut into squares, "potion of healing" were just Hugs with labels on them (I was informed that the potions are always red but since it would have taken way too many boxes to find enough red drinks for everyone we used green too since Creepers are his favorite character from the game), "slime balls" were green grapes, "raw fish" were goldfish crackers, and carrots and gold apples were, well, carrots and apples ;) Printables for the food and drink lables came from here, though I did resize and edit them a bit, as well as use them for the base to make the other signs for the party. I found the printable for the large Steve and the Creeper here. The table set up was pretty simple (and inexpensive) too. It doesn't take a lot to make a big statement. The plates were just green plates with Creeper faces that I had cut out of vinyl with the Silhouette machine. And the table runner was green wrapping paper that I quickly cut into block-type forms on the edges. I used the Silhouette to cut a pattern for the Creeper face out of cardstock and used it and a Sharpie to make Creeper faces on the table runner and on a bunch of green balloons. The balloons went downstairs in the "party area," along with my standard bead board birthday banner. I also put a set a balloons out by the road and by the door, along with a Minecraft Welcome sign. I always try to do something like that in case a guest hasn't visited our house before so they can easily tell where the party is. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Tyler had invited his entire class to his party and not knowing how many kids would actually show up, planning was a little tricky. I decided to use the kitchen/living room for the food and do all the activities in the family room downstairs. I only set up one table, which was perfect for the amount of kids that did RSVP but I had another table and extra decorations on stand-by in case we had any show up unannounced. We only ended up with one that hadn't called ahead, so it was fine. Anyway. One of Tyler's first requests was to have "torches" as decoration so I printed off a few for the stairs/hallway and used crepe paper to form the "portal" (or am I confused and they only use that term in Skylanders??) Downstairs, I had turned my craft tables into "crafting tables" (of course!). It was just a simple matter of using electrical tape and a ruler to form the grid. Minecraft is all about building, so I had a few crafty projects planned. And again, not knowing how many kids would actually attend the party, I had planned accordingly. If we had a large number of guests, I had extra helpers on hand so we could split them up into smaller groups and do "stations" for the different crafts and games. I put all the things needed for each activity in its own little basket so we could just grab them as needed. As it turned out, we had about 10 kids attend so they just did everything in one big group, but I was still glad I had planned ahead and set it up this way. I always like to have some sort of low key activity for everyone to start working on when they arrive. This keeps the fidgeting and chaos to a minimum while still allowing time for any later guests to arrive without missing much of the planned activities. For the Minecraft party, our Arrival Activity was making Minecraft masks. I cut out a bunch of small squares out of colored paper and the kids glued them onto poster board that I had cut into squares with a couple of square openings for eyes. This worked pretty well, but these kids were HYPER that night so as soon as we could, we moved on to the more active games. This game was originally intended to be a beanbag toss, but the beanbags we have for our cornhole boards were too big for holes so we used Neft guns instead. Nerf dart look close enough to the TNT in the game, right? The kids didn't care - they had fun (though some of them were way too excited to wait their turns!). The next game was probably the favorite for our rowdy crew. I had filled a bunch of balloons and put a line of tape down the center of the room to split it into two parts. Yes, I was all creative and used some of the Creeper balloons as well as some smaller colored ones which could represent the other animals in the game - but I don't think the kids noticed or cared. The point of the game was to get all the balloons onto the other team's side. We played music while they bopped balloons back and forth (had intended to find Minecraft parody songs but forgot to get them cued up and just ended up using whatever was on the IPOD) until the music stopped, then everyone would freeze while we counted the balloons on each side. As I said - this game was a perfect way for them to use up their energy without hurting anything so we let them do 5 or 6 rounds before we headed upstairs for cake and gifts. The time just flew by and by the time everyone had finished eating and all the gifts were unwrapped we only had a few minutes left before parents would start arriving so I gave them some block character printables to assemble. This link has a lot of great printables for all of the blocks, characters, etc. As I said, the time went by so quickly we didn't end up using some of the activities I had planned. Like: Minecraft character Perler bead keychains. This activity alone probably would have taken them half an hour. And the bean bags were going to be repurposed to "Feed the Wolf." But I'd rather have too many activities planned than have bored kids at the end of a party. As they were working on the character printables, I also had them take turns assembling their own favor bags. For the favor bag tags I used a pdf file I found online (see this blog), added the rest of the message (in Photoshop) then printed them 6 to a page. The tags went inside a cellophane bag and the kids got to fill it with: Creeper face lollipops, (had an a-ha moment on this one and instead of cutting them all out by hand I figured out how to make my own pattern for the Silhouette to cut out - go me!) glow stick "torches" licorice "TNT" (Tyler was very pleased with those. When he saw them all assembled he told me "Mom, you've really outdone yourself!") and Hershey Kiss "emeralds, red stones, and silver" So there you have it! Paper, scissors, a printer, and a lot of ink - that's really all it takes to make a little guy happy on his birthday ;) Linking to: Link Party Palooza
I am completely obsessed with this French Cafe Birthday Party shot by Heather Mildenstein Photography and created by Pink Peach
How To Throw a Fantastic Circus Animal Parade Party. Recreate these adorable circus party ideas to celebrate your little one's next birthday!
Sharing Blakely's Sprinkle Party from decorations to treats and all the sprinkle themed ideas in between! Get all the tips and tricks from Courtney Whitmore
Kids paint and collage giant donuts cut from recycled cardboard.
Beautiful ladies luncheon ideas for menu and décor to celebrate friends, moms, or brides! Easy recipes and tips for a make ahead lunch.
STYLISH RETRO Pink Flamingo Pool Party with an ombre pink cake ball tower, soft blue printables, umbrella & lei photo booth props & ice cream
Last weekend we had Piper’s 2nd birthday party in our backyard and it was one of my favorite days ever. I’ve never seen Piper so excited or happy, she had a beaming smile on her face the entire time! I took a gamble with having her party outside, but our yard is just so perfect […]
Planning a baby shower? Sprinkle baby shower is the hottest trends and here is how to pull it off.
Kids paint and collage giant donuts cut from recycled cardboard.
So excited to share Marlowe's 3rd birthday party with you guys! We all know I love a good themed party, and Marlowe was totally the ins...
Jazz up your kid's next party with these Sprinkle Dipped Cups! This simple finish is a feast for the eyes and will add more fun to the celebration.
