Art Party

Now that things have settled down a bit at our house, I thought I would write up the party plan from Emily’s birthday party. Since both Elise and Abby insist that they are going to have an art party, it will be a good resource for me to look back on . . . and hopefully it will be helpful to some other blogging mom.

Invitation: I thought it would be cute to have the a-r-t in party be artsy, so I manipulated an old scrapbook sticker that said “our little artist”. It took all of my Photoshop skills to make it work, but I was really happy with how it turned out.


We had the invitations printed at Walgreens (4 x 6 prints). For the envelopes I printed an envelope template on one side of a piece of colored paper and printed the girl’s name (on a clipart crayon) on the other side. Emily cut them out, folded the flaps, and glued them together. She loved making them.


Set-up: We planned the party in stations. We found four different art projects for the girls to do and just moved from one to the other. We turned our playroom into a mini art studio. We got long tables from our church and covered them in paper. We set up two work areas, each with two tables. We set out all of the materials for the first two projects before the girls got here and put an old t-shirt out for each girl to wear during the painting activity so their clothes wouldn’t get ruined.


Activities:

Birdhouses: We found these cute little wooden birdhouses at JoAnn’s for a dollar. We bought some self-adhesive scrapbook borders for the girls to use as trim after they had painted their houses. We had them paint their birdhouses first and set them aside to dry while we did the other activities. They used acrylic paints and foam brushes. If I was going to do it over again, I would make sure that each girl had two brushes. We washed them out for them between colors, but it would have gone smoother and been less of a hassle if they each had a spare. They added the stickers at the end of the party when the paint had dried. This project was a favorite for several of the girls.



Sand Art: We ordered sand art pens and keychains from Oriental Trading. We also got an assortment of colored sand and funnels. I found some fun little flashlight keychains on Meritline for super cheap, so we put one of those on each dolphin as well. We made two cups of each color of sand so there would be plenty to go around and set out a bunch of plastic spoons for the girls to use to pour sand into their funnels. They needed a little help to get the sand right to the top of the containers, but other than that they were able to work on their own. It was the first time most of them had done sand art and they seemed to love it.


Win, Lose, or Draw: We thought that we should have at least one game. We divided the girls into two teams and had a stack of cards with easy to draw words. Each girl had a turn (one minute) to draw for her team and they got a point for each one they guessed correctly. It didn’t go as well as we thought it would. The girls were a little too spastic for a sit down game. They quickly lost interest and wandered around when it wasn’t their team’s turn (and sometimes even when it was their team’s turn). This is the one part of the party that we would skip if we had to do it over again.


Sugar Cookie Suckers: We used Betty Crocker Sugar Cookie mixes to make the cookies. We rolled the dough pretty thick (about ¼ inch), cut out four inch circles, and inserted a Wilton cookie stick before we baked them. For decorating we had 7 different colors of frosting. We filled two bags with each color and used a round tip on one and a star tip on the other. We also had bowls of candy (Mike and Ikes, Skittles, and Nerds) for the girls to use for decorating. The girls loved this activity. All of them made really cute cookies, but some of them didn’t know when to stop and ended up with an indiscernible mass of frosting and candy. I’m glad we got to send them home before the sugar high kicked in.


ID Bracelets: We bought some stretchy string, a package of alphabet beads (7mm), and two sizes of colored wooden beads (5mm and 8mm) for the girls to make ID bracelets. We sorted through the alphabet beads ahead of time to make sure we had all of the right letters. It was good that we did since there were only six E’s in a package of 500 beads. Crazy. Nate and I helped tie the knots when they were done and put some clear fingernail polish on the knot to seal it. Our technique was apparently not so great since two out of our three girls’ bracelets came undone the next day. Better luck next time. :)


Cake: I wanted to make Emily a paint palette cake, but I had already made one for her 7th birthday. I decided to use the same basic design and just shake things up a bit. To make it special, I made a rainbow cake. I used two white cake mixes (prepared just like it says on the box) and separated them into six equal parts. I used food coloring gel to color the batter every color of the rainbow. I carefully poured the cake mix in layers in a 9x13 pan. I thought that it would result in a layered rainbow cake, but that’s not exactly how it worked. The batter bubbled up as it was cooking making for a more of a colorful tie-dyed look. I loved it, and the girls all thought it was very cool when we cut into it. It was a big hit.


Piñata: The piñata was my favorite thing from the party. It was easy to make and turned out really cute. I started with a rectangular box from the post office and spray painted it yellow. I used two different shades of green paper to make the triangles up the side. Then I scanned in a crayon box and printed off the parts I wanted to use on white cardstock and cut them out. I used double stick tape to attach both the green paper and the parts I printed from crayon box. Nate reinforced the top of the box using a PVC pipe and zip ties inside the box so the rope wouldn’t just rip through the cardboard at the first whack. We filled it with candy and Silly Bandz. The girls loved it! (Who doesn’t love a piñata?)



Party Favor: We found these cute little “color your own” pencil bags at Michael’s. We had originally planned on using them for one of the four projects during the party, but decided that they would take too long to finish. So, we sent them home as a party favor instead.


Overall, it turned out to be a really fun party. Emily couldn’t have been more pleased.