Maren's Donuts and Pajamas Birthday party

Maren's birthday party came right on the heels of the church party that I decorated for, making for one busy week! When we were talking about what kind of party Maren wanted to have, she came up with the idea of a candy party. I seriously love candy, but we couldn't come up with a way to translate that into party games or activities other than, you know, eating candy. I thought about it a little more and hit on the idea of a sprinkle-themed party, but again I couldn't figure out how to translate that to a whole party. Sprinkles led to the idea of donuts, and when I poked around Pinterest looking for inspiration I found an invitation for a 'donuts and pajamas' birthday party. Lucky for me, Maren loved the idea!

I purchased this custom invitation from Etsy (I can't post my own photo because I can't figure out how to blur out all of our personal info) and had the invitations printed at Costco. I didn't have any envelopes large enough and didn't want to go buy any, so we ended up packaging them in a clear cellophane bag with rainbow sprinkles dumped inside like confetti. I sealed the bags with brightly colored washi tape. Wish I could show you a photo because they looked so cute! Since the party guests were supposed to wear their pjs, we held the party from 9:00-11:00 on a Saturday morning.

Instead of a birthday cake, Maren chose to have a donut cake, specifically a glazed donut cake. I poured chocolate and white milk into my vintage glass milk bottles, a detail that was completely lost on a bunch of 9-year-old girls but made me happy. :)

 

I found fun, brightly colored paper plates on clearance at Target and pulled the pink and white stripey straws from my stash. The plastic 'milk' bottles were a purchase from Groopdealz a few years ago. 

Instead of a tablecloth, I purchased a huge sheet of donut wrapping paper from Paper Source. I am totally in love with the bright colors and illustrations of donuts that look good enough to eat!

Paper Source also had this cool donut garland kit. I had planned to make up my own paper donut garland but the kit was totally worth the money.

The kit came with pre-punched donut shapes and templates to make the icing swirls and fringe paper to cut the sprinkles. Making the garland was a fun activity that Maren and I did together. I love it so much that I confess it's still hanging up in my doorway, three weeks after the party. It's just so cute and happy!

When the guests arrived I had them each make a tag to hang on their goody bag using shipping tags and letter stickers and ribbon scraps. I ran out of time to make the tags myself and needed a little something else to fill some time, so this worked perfectly and I already had all of the materials.

The first big activity was decorating donuts. I purchased four dozen boxed plain cake donuts from my grocery store. They were larger than mini donuts but smaller than the kind they sell individually and very economical at around $2 per dozen. Each girl wrote their name on their paper plate and had four donuts to decorate.

I made up a few different bowls of brightly-colored glaze using powdered sugar and milk with a few drops of food coloring and one bowl of chocolate glaze (just add unsweetened cocoa powder). I set out bowls of pretty sprinkles from my collection and let the girls dip their donuts in glaze and then decorate them.

I anticipated this project being a mess but I was actually really surprised out how pretty the donuts turned out! The photo doesn't really do them justice. My favorites were the gold sanding sugar and the neon pink nonpareils with the aqua and pink glaze. After the girls were finished, we set aside their plates so that the glaze had a chance to set up.

The next activity was making donut charm bracelets. When I was planning the activity, I remembered that I had a bunch of teeny tiny glass bottles. I filled each one with rainbow sprinkles and added a tiny eye hook to the cork. I coated the corks with super glue before I stuck them in the bottles so I hope they hold! I ordered plain charm bracelets from Amazon and used jump rings to attach a sprinkle bottle to each one.

The girls got to make donut charms for their bracelets using Shrinky Dinks inkjet plastic. I designed 4 different cute donuts with faces like this one, then scanned them and printed them out on the white shrink plastic. The girls decorated them with colored Sharpie markers, cut them out and punched holes in the top and then we baked them.

I did run into some problems with this project when I was getting it ready. I've made Shrinky Dinks plenty of times before but I had a terrible problem with these curling up in the oven, then getting stuck together and refusing to flatten back out. I did some Googling and found that if I put a sheet of parchment paper over the plastic it was just enough weight to keep them from curling as they baked. I also found that I couldn't use my usual colored pencils to color the Shrinky Dinks because of the coating on the plastic that makes it possible to put it through the printer. That resulted in a run to JoAnn's to purchase a mega-pack of colored Sharpies. It wasn't ideal and was an added expense I hadn't anticipated, but it was really the only option. And now I have a whole bunch of colored Sharpie markers to use for another project, right?

The girls also got to choose a colored letter monogram charm for their bracelets (letter beads that I have literally had for 10+ years. Pack rat WIN). While we were baking the Shrinky Dinks and attaching them to the bracelets with jump rings, the girls played Just Dance Kids on the Wii. Thank goodness for Andrea and her jump ring skillz! We also took that time to package up the decorated donuts. I purchased small cardboard treat boxes from the Wilton aisle at JoAnn's and we put each girl's donuts inside with a bit of waxed paper to keep them separate, then wrote their names on the top with the Sharpies.

After that, it was time for 'cake' and milk in the cute little bottles...

...and then opening presents. By a stroke of luck I found donut jammies at Gymboree. It was fun to have that little matching detail. I even found a pair of donut jammies for her American Girl doll! And to take my devotion to a theme even further, I found these thank you cards at Paper Source. The description says they're supposed to be confetti, but I thought all of those little colored dots looked an awful lot like rainbow sprinkles!

It was such a fun party and it was nice to have it all over and cleaned up by noon! I hired one of my teenage babysitters to come and be my helper and she was fantastic, and this year again Andrea was a lifesaver (see last year's pinata-in-the-front-room debacle). And we had plenty of leftover donuts, which is never a problem! I loved putting it on for Maren but was awfully glad when it was over. Two parties in one week wore me out!

Church party decorations

The last time I posted, Baby Ben was one week old. Now he is 11 1/2 weeks old! Life has been busy and there have been a lot of things keeping me from posting, the biggest of which is that The Mister is gone and I am holding down the fort all by myself. Let's say he's on a very extended, overseas business trip. Some of you know his profession and can read between the lines and figure out what that means. He left when Ben was just shy of one month old and we hope he'll be home by Christmas. I'm not going to lie, it's been very hard and awfully lonely but we're hanging in there and trying to make the best of things on both ends.

With The Mister gone, I thought it would be a good idea to give myself some projects to keep me busy and keep my mind off his absence. I think I did too good of a job of that in March, as it was a crazy busy month and I was totally exhausted by the end of it! One of the projects I took on was helping with a dinner party for the women's organization in my church.

Photo source

This photo from Pinterest was my inspiration for the color scheme and centerpieces. I had originally wanted to do a color scheme of coral and mint but I couldn't find materials in those colors locally, so I went with a brighter pink and green with accents of metallic gold and a bit of yellow.

For centerpieces I really wanted to use fresh flowers. Trader Joe's just opened up in Denver and I love their inexpensive flowers! Fresh flowers seem like such an indulgence and I wanted the ladies coming to the party to feel like it was a special night that was worth their time.

For the flower vases I thought about doing a gold leafed treatment like the inspiration photo, but dismissed the idea because of the cost and effort that would require. Instead, I used this pin as my inspiration. I purchased plain glass cylindrical vases at the Dollar Store. I taped them off and sprayed the bottoms with gold paint. (sidenote: the spray paint was supposed to look like gold leaf but really didn't look a thing like it, in color or sheen. Disappointing but not a total disaster.) Once the paint was dry, I taped them off again and painted the bottom few inches of the vase with Mod Podge and covered the glue with sparkly gold glitter.

I purchased $35 worth of fresh flowers from Trader Joe's in shades of pink and yellow and used my feeble flower arranging skills to make six centerpieces for the tables. I think $35 worth of flowers + $6 worth of vases wasn't too bad at all for as pretty as they looked! They really brought a breath of Spring to the otherwise ugly church gym. The squares upon which the vases are sitting are two layered paper napkins from Target--one bright pink, one gold striped. I bought them (on super clearance!) for another decorating project that didn't work but this was a last-minute idea and I really like how it anchored the vases on the white tablecloths.

For the rest of the room my goal was to make the most impact for the least amount of money, since I spent so much on the flowers. I have long wanted to try making the tissue paper tassels I've seen frequently on Pinterest and this gave me a perfect opportunity. I used bright pink, green, metallic gold and green and gold tissue papers. The kelly green with shiny gold foil patterns was from the dollar store and I love how it looked with the other colors! I made four dozen tassels and strung them on jute twine. They hung on the sides of the buffet table.

I had plenty of tissue paper left over after the tassels so I made a whole bunch of tissue paper flower poofs in different sizes. To make them easy to pin to the wall, I only opened them to one side so the back was flat. We pinned them in clusters to the walls using pushpins. It's hard to tell the scale from this photo but the large pink flowers were about 16" across. I'm sorry that the color on these photos are so bad--the gym has terrible fluorescent lighting and I tried to color correct but they are still really off.

And one more fun and inexpensive decoration was these fringe garlands I made using dollar store plastic tablecloths. I was able to get 4 long garlands from 1 rectangular tablecloth and we simply swagged them on the walls and then added clusters of tissue flowers at the ends.

It's always a challenge to make our church gym look like it's not an ugly church gym and do it on a shoestring budget, at that. I am pleased with how the decorations turned out and made the event a little nicer and more special for the wonderful ladies in my church. I guess you could say that I enjoy the challenge of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear!

"Elf"-themed Ugly Sweater Party

PHEW! This afternoon I finally dropped off my 3 boxes loaded with wrapped gifts to be mailed to our extended families in Utah, and now I feel like I can relax a bit. I'm still not completely ready for Christmas--no matter how much I try to be organized and have lists, I still feel like every time I go shopping I somehow manage to forget something, which is so aggravating! I've been to Target 5 times in the last week and a half and I never thought I'd say it, but I think I'm sick of going to Target! LOL The combination of a late Thanksgiving and doing the Rue de Noel market along with being 8+ months pregnant has made it hard to feel on top of things. Having those boxes out the door really does help my stress level go way down!

Even though it's kind of late in the season for parties, I wanted to post about last year's "Elf"-themed sweater party that I helped decorate. I didn't get around to posting it last year before Christmas and I didn't want to hold onto it until next year. I have some dear friends who have held an Ugly Sweater party for the last few years. Last year I helped my friend organize the party and decorate for it. We had other festive plans that morning so I didn't get to go as all-out as I would have liked, but I still managed to add a few fun touches that referenced the movie.

 A quick centerpiece for the food table: an Elf-green cake plate topped with fake snow, a silver Empire State Building ornament, a homemade snowglobe with "New York City"inside, a bottle of maple syrup and candy canes.

I hung hand-cut snowflakes and paper chains like the ones Buddy makes in the movie.

 

I will totally admit that one of my contributions to the buffet was a meat-and-cheese tray, purely so that I could make this sign to sit next to it.

My other contribution was a batch of hot chocolate cupcakes with teeny tiny marshmallows on the frosting!

I made two other signs with quotes from the movie. Luckily my friend had a few Santa decorations out that I could put them near.

An Ugly Sweater Party definitely requires a photo booth so that there is a photographic record of all of the heinous outfits the guests wear. I made some Elf-themed props for our photos.

Last year we also decided to incorporate a White Elephant gift exchange into the party activities, which ended up being pretty darn hilarious--so funny, in fact, that I was too busy laughing to take any photos of the 'gifts'. (Two words: Shake Weight.) However, I do have photos of our other two party games: the spaghetti challenge and the burping contest.

The spaghetti challenge was not for the faint of heart. Or digestive tract. 

Each willing participant got a plate of spaghetti, liberally doused with syrup and garnished with mint M&Ms and broken cookies. First one to finish their plate was the winner.

Or the loser, whichever way you look at it.

It was horrifying. Horrifying but HYSTERICALLY funny. The next game was the belching contest.

Participants were allowed to choose from a variety of 2-liter sodas (all chosen for maximum carbonation) and then graded on duration, creativity, and volume of their resulting belches. Extra points given for style. Although two men participated, please note that the winner was one of the lovely ladies.

She got to take home this lovely custom trophy.

Due to my busy November and December, I'm totally off my game in the ugly-sweater-thrifting department. I should have been out there looking back in November when the racks began appearing at the thrift stores but I was too busy at home hot-gluing things, and now I'm paying the price because there are no more ugly sweaters to be found! My big belly makes it even trickier to find something to wear so I think we're going to end up recycling last year's models--thank goodness I didn't get rid of them.

Tomorrow morning is the Ugly Sweater Run 5K (see last year's report) and I am having a serious "what was I thinking?" moment about it. Running it in my condition is obviously out of the question, but even walking 3.2 miles sounds like sheer torture at this point when the fastest I can move is at a moderately swift waddle. Back when I signed us up for this I obviously forgot what it feels like to be 35 weeks pregnant! The Mister and Maren may decide to run it but Porter and I are going to take it easy. Heck, I may just be one of the cheaters this year and cut it short. I will definitely be taking my camera and hopefully I'll have some awesome pictures to share again this year!

The Night Circus book club

Have you read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern?

If you haven't yet, then put it on hold at your library or grab it the next time you're at the bookstore, because it is fantastic! I first listened to the audio version (read by the fabulous Jim Dale) last year but later bought my own copy because I knew it was one I'd like to read again. When my friend Becca invited me to join her book group last month and told me that October's book was this one, of course I agreed to join! And because Becca is a very kind friend, she even agreed to let me put together a display of treats for the book club meeting.

One of the things about The Night Circus that I love is that the author is good at describing the details of the beautiful, magical circus. I find it to be a very creatively inspiring book--so much so that I even created a Pinterest board devoted to the world of the book! As I was reading again this time, I kept notes of details from the book that would be fun to include in my display.

For treats, Becca made ooey-gooey caramel popcorn, which we served in black and white striped paper popcorn bags. Peeking from behind the popcorn you can just see a big, glittery raven (to represent Celia's raven). I also tucked a black and silver feather boa around the platters and the whole display sat on a base of black satin fabric.

I made cinnamon twists from puff pastry brushed with butter and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon to represent the ones that Poppet, Widget and Bailey eat at the circus.

My favorite treat to make were these chocolate mice, served up on a pair of black glass pedestals that were ringed with a black mirrored wreath. Their bodies are made of Oreo truffles and then I rolled them in more crushed Oreos to look like fur. I gave them sliced almond ears and a black licorice tail (it was actually cherry flavored--it's made by Wilton). They were darling and delicious.

To drink we had spiced cider (ours was cold, though the cider in the circus was served hot) and I got to use the absolutely fabulous owl and pumpkin punch bowl that I bought last year. We served our treats on black and white striped plates with matching paper napkins.

I had fun incorporating details from the book into my display. I just so happened to have one little white glove, perfect to represent the one that Poppet gives to Bailey. The bottles represent Widget's Bedtime Stories tent. I wish I had thought to print off some of Isobel's tarot cards.

The black and white striped paper lanterns are actually a string of lights I bought at Target last year. I forgot I had them until I opened up my Halloween boxes this past weekend and I knew I had to use them in my display. The black and white striped candles stood in antique cut glass candlesticks that are hung with crystals. Very elegant!

The glittery vintage-style banner with the moon and stars is another part of my Halloween decorations that I forgot I had. I think it was a perfect touch for this theme!

Somehow I managed to forget to take a picture of the whole spread at once but hopefully you can imagine from glimpses what I looked like. I had such fun putting it all together and I think it looked really great--definitely evoked some of the sparkle and magic from the book. It was very creatively fulfilling to put it all together--the only thing I had to buy were the plates and napkins! All of the rest of it came from my stash. I even got into the spirit, dressing like a reveur in a black and white striped cardigan and a red scarf. What a fun night!

The Minion Birthday party

 Hello, everybody! I have a husband again and I couldn't be happier! I mentioned before that he was gone for a while--he left on August 6 for a school and didn't come home until September 18. Oof, that was a rough one; really difficult on me physically, mentally and emotionally. SO glad to leave it behind. I feel 500% better in every way now that he is back again.

Porter turned 4 on September 17 and we decided to let him have a 'friend' party for the first time this year. Of course we had to to wait until Daddy came home to help us celebrate, and after throwing Maren's LEGO Friends party back in March solo (which I have just now realized that I never blogged), I was more than happy to wait for reinforcements.

I talked Porter into having a Minion party. He did insist on a Spiderman cake, and I gave in on that one because, let's be honest--the Minion thing was kind of all about me. I found some really great printable resources through Pinterest that made the party really easy to put together.

For party favors I made Minion Twinkies using this free printable, which was originally designed to go around push-up pops but happens to fit perfectly around Twinkies! I will recommend that if you make these, you buy the Sara Lee or Little Debbie versions though, because they come in clear wrappers whereas the Twinkies have Hostess printed in red all over the wrapping and that annoyed me. I used the free printable from here to make the little labels to transform tiny squirt guns into Vector's Squid Launchers. Because my guns were smaller I had to closely trim the labels and then I ran them through my Xyron sticker maker to turn them into labels. The favors also included a few Minion bandages (Wal-Mart), and some little candies and Minion tattoos from Party City. I packaged them all up in large cello bags (Dollar Tree) and tied them with yellow ribbons.

I found this fantastic printable download for Minion goggles on Etsy and it was absolutely worth the $2.99! It gives you three different sizes of goggles and mouths. For my Minion balloons I used the largest size of goggles printed onto full-sheet label paper (Wal-Mart) and cut them out and just adhered them onto the balloons.

I also used the printable goggles for our Pin the Goggles on the Minion game, though I forgot to take any photos of them. I printed those onto regular paper and just cut them out and put tape on the back--no point wasting the sticker paper for this task. For the picture I free-handed the Minion and Maren helped me color him.

And the third use for the printable goggle download was to make the faces on the bottles for our Minion bowling game! I used the smallest size goggles and I did print these on sticker paper. I used 1 liter bottles of clear flavored water, then wrapped a piece of yellow cardstock around the top and a strip of blue around the bottom. The sticker paper goggles and mouths were easy to adhere and the bottles cracked me up! We set them up and let the kids roll a basketball at them.

There is also a free printable available to make your own Minion goggles available here. I printed these out on white cardstock and then cut and assembled them. I ended up adding a piece of elastic string to the back, attached to each earpiece, because they wouldn't stay on the kids' heads with just the cardstock. I forgot to get any photos of those, darnit! Between the goggles for the kids, the ones on the balloons, bottles and for the game, I cut out SO MANY GOGGLES!

The other game we played was made also using a free printable from here. The original idea was to use a Nerf gun to shoot the aliens but don't have one of those, and instead found a 3-pack of water guns on super clearance from Target. I printed the aliens and space ships on plain printer paper and then 'laminated' them using clear packing tape on the front and back before I cut them out. I did have to tape tongue depressors to the backs to keep the aliens from flopping over. I cut slots into the top of some plastic cups and poked the tongue depressors through there so the aliens would stand up.

The plastic cup setup wasn't ideal, as our water guns were too weak to knock over the aliens but the kids didn't seem to care much and just had fun squirting water all over!

I even got to draw Minions on my cute chalkboard banner! Hooray for colored chalk. Oh, and one last thing we did was that I found Despicable Me printable coloring sheets for the kids to color as we waited for all of the guests to arrive.

The party was really very easy and fun. I made everything the morning of the party although it would have of course been a lot easier to get it ready beforehand (hello, procrastination). We had 4 little guests besides Porter, which was the perfect number. The weather was beautiful (unlike Maren's snowy party) and we were able to do all of the party games outside so I didn't have to worry about 5 excited little boys trashing my house. :)

I think Porter had a happy day! This is him exclaiming over his gift from us, a pet fish. :)