Kimber's 3rd Birthday Little Mermaid Style

Kimber LOVES the little mermaid! So does her mom and her aunt and all of us really. So a little mermaid party was so fun for us. Decorating with sea shells and sand just comes natural for us and was so easy to pull things from all over our house for this party. Party favors were sand pails and toys with bubbles. We tried to keep the food simple and fun with the theme. We served foods with sand shovels. 

Kimber and her mom, Becca, made chocolates in sea shapes that we put on the cupcakes and cake. We tried making a sand castle cake. Much harder than it looks but with Kimbers help we were able to pull it off. :-) It is made with ice cream cones turned upside down and marshmallows on the cake layer. Frost everything and then dust with crumbled vanilla wafer cookies. We also added more of the chocolate shells and starfish.

We also made oyster shell cookies by frosting vanilla wafers and putting a yogurt covered almond in for the pearl.

We made a seafoam green punch with lime sherbet and blue jello with gummy fish.

We  drew a picture on poster board of a mermaid girl and beach boy for guest to take pictures with. It is always fun to pretend.

We also had a backdrop of blue material to be our ocean and Becca made some jelly fish with streamers and bowls to hang in our sea.

Julie gave Kimber a couple of hermit crabs for her present. We had so much fun. especially eating cake :-)

Dragon Party

My son just turned 6 and he wanted a Dragon Party. Not a Dinosaur party, Not a How to Train Your Dragons Party, Just a Dragon Party. We found a lot of ideas with the other two parties mentioned and incorporated them into our focused on dragons party.

I bought a cardboard castle for the kids to color and play in for the party. If I do this again I will have them color before the party so it is ready during the party but they had fun just the same coloring and playing.

I also bought cardboard dragons that could be colored and put together to play with. 

I made little dragon wings for each person out of felt. This was fairly easy as well. I just cut felt in graduating strips and sewed it together. There are ties for the wrists and you could make ties for the neck as well or maybe velcro for safety but I just pinned the middle part to their shirts.

I bought dinosaur mask from Oriental Trading and we used the ones that looked dragon like and went with the wings.

We bought a dragon pinata from a party supply store and filled it with candy and toy dragons.

 The Cake was the highlight of the party. It was so easy and turned out great.  It was designed to be a volcano and had dragons around it. The kids loved it. The best part was that it actually erupted.

I bought two premade angel food cakes and stacked them together and then cut them to look like a volcano shape. I frosted them with chocolate frosting and then drizzled yellow and red frosting around the top edge to look like lava. I put a small jar inside the tube cake and added some baking soda to the jar before the party. Before serving I poured vinegar colored with red food coloring in the jar and the reaction with the baking soda cause the volcano to erupt. The kids loved it. I was concerned that the baking soda and vinegar would make the cake taste bad so I made cupcakes as well. However the cake did taste fine and the kids werent turned off by the lava at all.

For the cupcakes, I baked red and yellow cake pops and added one to each cupcake cup before poured the chocolate cake batter on top of them. I baked them as usual and frosted them with chocolate frost and then drizzled the red and yellow frosting lava on each one as well. When the kids bit into the cupcakes they had a surprise of either red or yellow "lava" inside.

The party was great fun and my son was happy that it was all about dragons. The activities were coloring the castle and dragons, playing with the castle and dragons, the pinata and being a dragon with the wings and masks.

It was very easy to do everything and I will do the cake again. Could be used for a dinosaur party, science experiment party or many other things. I hope you enjoy our ideas and feel free pin them or share them with others, linking back to our blog of course.

Fairy Princess 1st Party

We Recently had a Fairy Princess Party for our granddaughters 1st birthday. We had so much fun and she was an adorable fairy princess. 

For invitations we sent out a card that said the following:

Peek into the garden, and what will you see? A beautiful fairy, sitting under a tree. Her name is Kimber, and she's turning one. Won't you join her for a party, full of fairytale fun.Fairy, gnome, elf or other mythical creature costumes are encouraged. We had a backdrop that we used years ago for a dance camp and just hung it up in our party room to create a nice setting and give us a backdrop for pictures. It is just a canvas dropcloth painted with a castle on it.

We hung paper pom poms and balloons to give the room a whimsical feel.

We had cake made of a fairy castle and little fairies sitting on it. We also had several kinds of cupcakes. We were also celebrating several other birthdays in the family so the cupcakes served as cakes for the grown ups as well. We also had fairy dust candy in cups and fairy crown lollipops.

We asked everyone to dress as characters that would come to a fairy princess party and everyone was creative with their costume ideas.

gnome and woodland fairy

gnomes

king, fairy princesses

fairy princess and unicorn

woodman and fairy princess

dragon

We made lace crowns ahead of time by soaking fabric lace in fabric stiffener and drying. We then painted the lace and added glitter.

She had a great time and enjoyed her first birthday cake. The top was designed to take off so she had her very own cake to eat.