American Girl Crafts House Party

Maren and I were chosen to host an American Girl Crafts House Party and this morning was our event. House Party is a website that partners with different companies to get the word out about their products by introducing them at parties. Anybody can apply to be a host and it's completely free! Depending on what demographic the sponsor is looking for, you may be chosen to host a party and you receive a fun Party Pack with all kinds of goodies to share with your friends. This particular party was sponsored by American Girl Crafts and we were thrilled to be chosen as hosts! Maren has an American Girl doll AND she loves to do arts and crafts by herself and with friends, so it was a perfect fit for her.

Our Party Pack was filled with these fantastic My Life Scrap & Stuff books, one for each party guest.

We also received dozens of packages of cute coordinating embellishments for the books: die cuts, chipboard letters, dimensional stickers, cute patterned tapes, and much more!

The table was absolutely full of fun things to use to decorate the books. Each book has a nifty glue pen included but I also supplied extra glue sticks for the girls.

We invited our guests to bring their American Girl dollies with them to the party. Some of the girls brought more than one doll--we had quite the crowd at the doll tea party!

We didn't want the dolls to be left out, so we made tiny doll-sized scrapbooks for the guests to decorate and take home. I simply cut cardstock and colored copy paper to size and stapled them down the spine to make a little booklet.

The girls loved personalizing them with the American Girl historical doll stickers that were included in our Party Pack.

The girls happily created and worked on their books.

The hardest thing was probably to choose which of the fun embellishments to use on each page!

The My Life Scrap & Stuff book is designed to be a project that the girls can add to over time. They can journal, include memorabilia and ephemera from their daily lives, photos, and drawings--the more, the better! After they created for a while, we stopped and took a cute group photo with the girls, their books and their dollies.

The girls enjoyed lunch outside on the patio while I cleaned up the craft mess on the table. Even though they had crafted hard, there were still plenty of embellishments leftover so I divided it all up so that the girls could each take home supplies to work on their books in the future.

For food and decorations, we were inspired by this cute paper tablecloth I had stashed away with my party supplies.

Using the colors of the confetti dots as inspiration, I chose 5 different patterns of washi tape from my craft stash. Maren and I used the washi tape and striped twine to make tiny banners to hang over the table and add to the festive feeling.

I also used strips of washi tape to decorate clear plastic 'milk' bottles, then added a sticker letter with each party guest's first initial. Of course, there had to be stripey straws!

The washi tape make the bottles look so cute, and yet I can easily peel it off so the bottles can be washed and reused.

For food, we stuck with a 'tiny' theme in honor of our dollies. I made tiny sandwiches by cutting peanut butter sandwiches into small triangles and securing them with jeweled toothpicks.

We also had baby carrots and tiny grape tomatoes, blueberries, mini Oreos, mini Nilla Wafers and mini cupcakes. I loved that the confetti sprinkles on the cupcakes looked like the colorful dots on the tablecloth! We had pink lemonade in a fancy dispenser to put into the cute milk bottles.

The food was very simple; the cupcakes were store-bought and even making eight peanut butter sandwiches wasn't difficult at all (I'm a stay-at-home mom--I could make a pbj in my sleep! Probably have at some point. ;) The girls gobbled up nearly everything, so cleanup was a breeze as well.

I'm delighted that we were chosen to host this House Party and to familiarize ourselves more with American Girl Crafts. I know our party guests loved their Scrap & Stuff books and had so much fun working on them today. I love that they're a project the girls can continue to work on and a way for them to explore their creativity!