It’s a pARTy!

Today my little Avery turned 6 years old! She’s not so little anymore! She wears skirts and dresses almost all the time now, she loves to carry her 11 month old baby sister around, she’s going into 1st Grade in the fall, she is a great reader, and she is just so beautiful! For the past three years we’ve been doing princess birthday parties for her so when I saw some “Art party” ideas start popping up on Pinterest I convinced Avery to let this be her theme. She loves arts and crafts so it didn’t take much to convince her!

We did a paint palette/rainbow color scheme. We invited 9 of her friends but only 5 could make it, which was a perfect amount for me! Here’s the invitation we sent out:

I thought they turned out pretty cute! I spent pretty much all week (and some of last week) shopping, crafting, and getting everything figured out for the party today. I found so many cool ideas that I didn’t even end up using. We were going to do most of it outdoors but it was about 90 degrees today and since we had 7 kids and our table holds 7, it worked out perfectly to do everything indoors.

Here are some pictures of everything set up before the guests arrived. An easel set up outside the front door:

The creating room!

Popsicle stick easels we made (so quick and easy) and glued on name cards, plus art supplies in cans and jars.

I taped up some brown Kraft paper on the wall for the kids to color, plus I hung up aprons that I made for each guest (out of a Target outdoor tablecloth and ribbon). Plus I got that purple frame at Good Will, removed the picture and painted it purple for the kids to do a photo shoot.

I set up a “Masterpieces” table for all of their art projects to dry on. I decided to do this last minute and I’m glad I did – it really came in handy.

I cut out this palette shape out of foam board and we played “paint the green on the palette”.

Ahh, the food! The “Starving Artists: Feed your Creativity” station was pretty fun. The mini waterbottles were labeled “creative juices”, rainbow fruit kabobs, rainbow goldfish, palette cookies, and a cake. (We also had pizza.)

These were fun. I just made circle sugar cookies and then iced them to look like palettes and added M&Ms. A crowd pleaser!

Avery and I agreed that we wanted to WOW the crowd by leaving the cake an unassuming white color, so we could get some good reactions when we cut into it!

I found these cute notebooks at Michael’s and added a little tag and ribbon to go in their goody bags. They also got a sparkle gel pen, pencil, stencil, and a couple homemade crayons (we took all of our old crayon bits, chopped them up and melted them in a mini muffin pan to make rainbow colors).

So here are some pictures of the fun times at the party! Our first craft was decorating their goody bags. I bought plain white bags, wrote their names on them with puffy paint and gave them stickers, crayons, and markers and they had a lot of fun. We had to stop them after a while because we had other things to do!

Our next project was painting a masterpiece. I talked to the kids about painting, gave them some ideas on what to paint, and every kid got a canvas board to paint something on. We used egg cartons to give them 4 colors to paint with and they all did great. No big messes and everyone’s paintings turned out great!

Then we did the pin the paint on the palette game while Merrick (my trusty helper!) cleaned up the table for us.

Next we made headbands but I didn’t take any pictures of it. I bought plain black elastic headbands, hot glued on a felt heart shape and then they just glued on some sequins. Pretty quick.

Then we ate lunch and while the kids were working/eating I did some face painting on their cheeks. It was my first time face painting but it wasn’t too hard! And the kids seem to like it – what kid doesn’t like getting their face painted? We took pictures of the kids in the purple frame and I thought they were cute.

They decorated the wall too.

Lastly we ate cake and opened presents. The light from the one little #6 candle was really bothering Avery’s eyes so she had to blow it out with her eyes closed, haha.

The cake turned out to be a big surprise and they were all happy to gobble some up. It was a little bit more work than a normal cake, but I’m very proud of it!

The kids got to bring home their paintings and their apron too. It was a great party and I had a lot of fun getting things ready. Thanks to all of our family for the gifts and well wishes you sent to Avery! She has had a nice day so far! Merrick took her and Camryn to see Brave this afternoon, so that’s why I’ve had time to do some blogging… plus I couldn’t wait to show everyone how much fun we had! Happy Birthday Avery!