Rainbow Birthday Bash

Yesterday we celebrated Cordelia's 6th birthday with a Rainbow Bash theme. Originally we had planned on a small six kid party, but when we got the news that we would have to move came I figured we would do one more big party - with all of her friends invited. I hope we will be able to keep her in contact with at least a chunk of the friends she has made while growing up here, but I know busy schedules and living in different neighborhoods will make keeping in contact with everyone impossible, so I wanted to give her this last party before everything changes.   

Cordelia's party dress is the ultimate in rainbow dresses- or at least that was the goal. It's a patchwork of some of my sister and my favorite fabrics- Allison Glass, Tula Pink, Lizzy House, and many more. If you look close you can find cats, moons, bunnies, space ships, vegetables, and a whole host of interesting prints.  

The bodice is made from the Bella Sunshine Designs Coffee Shop Dress, with about three inches taken off the bottom. The skirt of the dress involved patching together 140 charm squares into seven rows, red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue and purple. The most time consuming part was cutting out all the charm squares! 

  

Cordelia was very please by the twirl factor in this dress. 

 

Because pockets are very important I hid two little pockets in the patchwork. 

For Adeline I made a simple rainbow romper from a vintage pattern- hopefully I will get more photos of her in it before she grows out of it! 

I think I did go a tiny bit simpler for the invite this year! 

For food we had rainbow jello cups, rainbow fruit skewers, m&m cookies (store bought), fruity pebble crispy treats, a rainbow veggie tray, colored gold fish, princes popcorn, and of course marshmallow pops (they seem to be a birthday party tradition at this point). 

Our Princess party popcorn is just regular popcorn with pink food coloring added to the butter. 

Every year I make one thing that is a little insane and time consuming- first birthday it was candy dots, second it was chocolate fish, third is was pretzel turtles...this year it was jello cups. They weren't hard but they took forever to make. 

Instead of decorating fancy cupcakes this year I made plain cupcakes and had the kids decorate them as an activity! This kids loved it, and I was glad we were outside because it was messy!

 

For other activities we had sidewalk chalk, bubbles, and a temporary tattoo station. We were also at a park so the kids had a blast just running around.  

Our only decorations (besides unicorn tablecloths from Target) was rainbow bunting. My sister found free printable bunting from Carrie Elle and we made tons of it.

  

And a free printable from the crafting chicks for rainbow seeds (jelly beans) for our favor!

Thank you to everyone who came out to party, and thank you to my sisters for their hard work, and thank you to my hubby for supporting my crazy love of party planning!

Cordelia Rockets to Five!

I have lots of thoughts about the fact my daughter is turning five- many of which I am sure I will talk about in another post- but right now I am a little amazed that (with the help of my amazing family) I have successfully thrown five themed birthday parties! Every year my husband says "no more" and every year in my exhaustion I agree....but I just love a good theme! 

This year Cordelia requested an outer space party- and with the help of pinterest (check out our board here)  my sister Shauna and I set to work.  I always figure parties break down into five categories: Invite, food, games, decorations, and the favor.  The invite (the first picture in the post) I made and included Cordelia's favorite planet Pluto (a dwarf planet is still a planet.....)

The Food! 

Shauna came up with most of the food ideas- she is becoming excellent at coming up with themed party foods! We had:

Rocket Dogs served with optional sun spots and mars magma

 (pigs in a blanket on sticks with mustard or ketchup) 

Asteroids (crock pot meat balls)
Space Crunch (veggie tray)
 A watermelon carved like a rocket (with added fruit)

Space shaped Goldfish

Saturn's Rings (Funyuns)

Meteors (orange cheese puff balls)

Yogurt dipped star cookies from Trader Joe's

Moon Rocks (Rice crispy treats shaped like rocks)

Alien Marshmallow Pops 

Galaxy Cupcakes (mini and regular size, with a star shaped one for the birthday girl)

Rocket Fuel (Water- because we gave the kids enough sugar to ruin the rest of the day) 

The Games

I am not big on directing kids at parties- I mostly want to let them run around and act crazy, so our games are pretty unstructured. We had a meteor toss.   

A coloring book- which seems to work well for the kids who want to scope out the activity before they dive in. 

"Pin" the rocket on Pluto. 

 

Brendon made a cardboard rocket ship that really was the main event! 

We finished off the party with a Pinata- which turned out to be indestructible. After the kids beat at it for awhile Brendon had to cut it open and make it rain candy- which turned out less than ideal because Cordelia got hit in the head with a piece of candy and it hurt pretty bad (she recovered ok with the help of a piece of candy) 

The Decorations 

Behind the food table we hung black table cloths and decorated them with tons of silver stars and a solar system that Cordelia painted.  On the table we added purple table cloths with multi tone purple tulle (to kinda look like a nebula).

Cordelia, Shauna, and I made paper rockets to put up on one of the walls, we hung tons of paper balls from the ceiling, and my mom bought Cordelia lots of star balloons. 

One of my favorite decorations was the future space travel posters- designed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and given to the public for free download here. I am in love with these and I was thrilled that my sister made us super fancy quality prints - I kept them to hang up at home when the party was over. 

The Favor

  

Our favor was much more simple than in years past but this blue sparkly galaxy play dough was still a huge hit! 

Halloween Birthday Party Costume

I don't think you can have a truly awesome Halloween Birthday Party without a truly awesome costume. So when Cordelia asked to be a "blue and pink fairy" for her party I did my best to go all out.

We ordered these really awesome soft wings from Amazon (I think they might be the best thing I have ever bought Cordelia because we break wire wings in three days and she can wear them in the car which has saved us soo many tears) and based the rest of the costume around them. It was a challenging pink to match, but in the end (and with the help of my nephew who wanted to cry because I was soo indecisive at the fabric store) I am really happy with how it came out. The bodice is a calico cotton, and the skirt is a couple layers of metallic blue dress up fabric, teal fish scale organza, dark teal sparkle tulle, and pink shinny tulle. 

I was tickled to find flowers that matched soo well for the crown and the waist- and this is the first flower crown I have ever made! 

I did not make the wand because I ran out of time, so I was very happy when the pink glitter I used to recover an old worn out pair of shoes helped to tie the wand into the theme! 

The most fun I have sewing is when I can make Cordelia something that I know I would have loved to have as a kid. Sometimes Its hard not to feel that she is soo totally her father's child- but fairies, princesses, magic and fabulous dresses? That's totally our thing.