40th birthday party for my husband

May 4, 2014Mellu Leave a comment

I threw a party for my husband’s 40th birthday and it was super fun to plan a party for adults (not that I don’t like doing the kid’s parties, but it was a nice change!) You only turn 40 once, so I went all out and rented some bistro tables, plates, and glasses and rearranged the house and even hired a bartender (which, by the way, was a huge help and allowed me to enjoy the party also!) The party was on Saturday, so the bistro tables were delivered on Friday and picked up on Monday (also night… allowing me plenty of time to set up and tear down).

some assembly required. 🙂 We rented from Grand Event Rentals and they were great and responded quickly to my questions.

The color theme was black and blue, so I moved all our black furniture (couch and a couple benches) into the living room and used black linens on the tables.

The curtains were made with black streamers. I cut a strip for the top and attached the long streamers to it and then it was a little easier to just tape it all to the ceiling at once. Masking tape worked well. Then I draped it by tacking a strip to the wall to hold them back. I loved how this turned out and made a fun entrance and WAYYY cheaper than fabric curtains!

40 decorations from amazon

for the Christmas lights around the ceiling I used 3M Command hooks and they worked great and came off the wall really well afterwards.

I bought these really fun submersible blue LED lights and some blue water pearls to fill some random vases I had. Also with a glass tea light holder and black tea candle. They turned out so awesome! Set a fun mood.

Another fun project: I bought these plain coasters and sprayed them with black chalkboard spray paint (takes around 3 coats) and then people could write on them with chalk to keep track of which drink was theirs.

saw this idea on pinterest and loved it! Pictures from all the stages of life. 🙂

The Food!: The desserts were from Whole Foods (petits), strawberries, potato boats, stuffed mushrooms, pita bread with jalopeno artichoke dip, shrimp taco bites and cream cheese cucumber bites. The silver platters I found on Amazon and they are very fun. Also the napkins.

I played some awesome hits from the hubby’s younger years; some where awesome classics and some were glad to be in the past! 🙂

It was truly a fun party and I definitely need to do this again sometime!!

My Little Pony Party

April 9, 2014Mellu Leave a comment

It looks like we have turned a corner with my oldest and she has really wanted to help in the planning of her birthday parties. I always let the kids pick the theme they want, but she wanted to be really hands-on with the decorations and what activities we would do and the order of the party. Looks like I am training up another little planner! 🙂 She wanted a My Little Pony party this year. I had seen that Hasbro has blank white My Little Pony that you can order, so I ordered some of those. I had no idea how we would decorate those, but we decided on Permanent Markers… you can color the hair and everything. I wanted the girls to be able to take them home and not get wet paint all over. If you have more time, I would recommend the markers for the hair and then probably acrylic paint would be better for the body and produce a more even look and glitter glue for some sparkle.

Without further ado, here are the pics!

Lalaloopsy birthday party

March 24, 2014Mellu 1 Comment

Lalaloopsies are so adorable, I was excited when my daughter chose that theme for her birthday party. (the party was last fall and I am again behind on my posts!) First, I bought a book (for the kids) that had most of the lalaloopsies in it, so I could get an idea of decorations and activities for the party (and Pinterest of course). And we watched a Lalaloopsy show on Netflix (the show isn’t good, IMO … the plot is horrible), but I did get some ideas. Here are the pictures from her party with links and comments!

The buttons were cut out on the Cricut using my Wild Card cartridge. And then I just used a yarn needle and threaded yarn through the buttons to make garland.

Found these wall decals on clearance at Toys R Us… good deal, but they did NOT stick well at all… they were in the trash right after the party unfortunately. They also have them on Amazon and Birthday Express and hopefully better quality.

More Garland made from dessert size paper plates and a black paper button cutout glued to the plate.

More button garland! (I guess I got crazy with the paper button cutting, because I had a lot!)

Used the book mentioned at the top of the page to help lookup a bunch of lalaloopsies on Bing image search (make sure you set the image size to wallpaper (or large) find the better quality images! Then I added the names and printed them out… (they moved to her bedroom wall after the party!)

For one activity, we stuffed, sewed and decorated little lalaloopsy pets. I prepared them, but printing out the pets on paper and tracing them and their pieces onto felt. Then glued some of the pieces on using felt glue (so they would have time to dry) and sewing the button eyes on. With the front and back felt pieces together, I used a very small 1/16 hole punch to punch around the edges. (warning: hand fatigue is possible!!)

We used embroidery floss to stitch them together and I had a bunch of plastic yarn needles for sewing them and stuffing.

Also felt markers (found at a fabric/craft store) for decorating.

For the second craft, I purchased a bunch of small prepared canvas boards from Michaels and precut with my cricut the first letter of the girls who were attending the party. I traced their letter onto the canvas with pencil and we used thick glue dots to glue on buttons to fill in their letter.

buttons from Oriental Trading

The last activity was a Lalaloopsy board game and it was so cute. It comes with a little lalaloopsy doll and it involves someone hiding the doll and they others picking cards to figure out which room she is in and then they have a minute to try to find her. (I had all the kids go look instead of one at a time as the directions say). Also I took out the cards of the rooms that I didn’t want the kids looking in (bedrooms, etc)

lalaloopsy party supplies found here. I also crocheted a few flowers to stick around.

Button candy molds found here. I just melted Wiltons candy melts and poured them into the melts. Make sure you wait until they are good and cooled before you pop them out of the molds (some of mine turned out better than the others)

super cute cupcake topper from Amazon.

I found these tin lalaloopsy boxes from Hobby Lobby and they worked great to put their little animals in and some stickers.

Fall Baby Shower

January 6, 2014Mellu Leave a comment

Another baby shower that I helped with last fall was a fall themed shower. I used my Cricut a lot this time with the Flower Shoppe cartridge (one of my favorites) and made little flowers to set around in our fall-ish color scheme: plum, bronze, teal, brown, lite pink, and cream. We just did a few simple printed games for this shower and again I didn’t have to do food (in case you didn’t notice, it is my least favorite part of party planning).
The invitation.

Paper flower wreath for the front door.

Banner made with light and dark brown burlap strips and a variety of different ribbons and lace throughout.

Centerpiece (mini hay bales, flowers, acorns and leaf cutouts)

The food made by my friend was totally amazing and gourmet! YUM!

I had 2 party favors for the guest (mostly because I wasn’t sure if my caramel apples would turn out ok, but they ended up pretty yummy afterall.)

The little fall candles were from Bath and Body works and they even wrapped them all up for me and everything!

Outer Space Baby Shower

January 6, 2014Mellu Leave a comment

A few months ago, I hosted an Outer Space baby shower for a friend and her baby boy. Thanks to my friend Liz, I didn’t have to do much with the food, so I got to focus on my favorite things: the decorations, games and favors! Here are the pictures with descriptions below them:

The invitation created in Adobe Illustrator

This is a foam wreath, covered with white tulle. Then I cut out the rocket, star, and banner with my cricut and just pinned it onto the foam and added a ribbon to hang it.

Here is another banner made from my Cricut.

Here, I printed out different planets and cut them out. You can use a glue stick on the picture side of the paper and paste them to the bottom of a clear plate to go with the theme of the party.

The food and cut out stars scattered around.

I bought these whirly decorations of Amazon.

More cut out stars strung and displayed around.

Fun baby shower Memory game. Instructions HERE

The favors were popcorn balls with a little blue food coloring!

Baby Shower Memory Game

January 6, 2014Mellu 2 Comments

This baby shower game was first introduced by my sister-in-law at my first baby shower 10 years ago and I have used it a LOT at the showers that I have hosted and it is always a lot of fun and a nice change from the traditional baby shower games out there. (I always like to discover more unique baby shower games).

Here’s how it works. You make a board like the one above on some poster board… you can add more or fewer numbers depending on how many people will be at the shower. It is played like the children’s memory games, where the guest need to take turns to try to find the matching words below. (For example, if someone says #3 and you flip up the card and the word under it is “baby girl”, then they need to guess another number to find the other “baby girl”) When a match is made, remove the top numbered papers and give the guesser a candy prize (listed below). Play the game until all the words have been guessed.
Now here’s the fun part. The words (like “baby girl”) are all baby or pregnancy related and the candy prize is a candy bar that goes with the word… so “baby girl” would get a “Baby Ruth” candy bar. I have played it so many different times, that I came up with more words and candy bar combinations by spending some time in the candy isle at the drug store. You can tailor it to the type of people/personalities that will be at the shower… you’ll see what I mean when you see the word list below… some take a fun crowd to appreciate them! 🙂 TIP: I have found the most candy bar selections at a drug store such as Bartells or Rite Aid.

So here are is the list of names/candy bar combinations that I have come up with, but be creative and come up with other combinations if you would like. (Obviously if you are from a non-USA country, you may need to be creative with the candy bars sold there.) Have fun!

Baby’s Cheeks ———————– Kissables (hersheys)
Breasts ——————————— Mounds
Baby Poop —————————  Tootsie Roll
Contractions ————————-  Whoppers
Engorgement ————————  Milkfuls
Crowning —————————– Look bar
Enima ———————————- Gobstoppers
Epidural ——————————- Life savors
Gestational Diabetes ————–  Sugar babies
Inverted Nipples ——————-    Milk duds
(Husband’s name) —————–   Big Hunk bar or Sugar Daddy
OB-GYN —————————— Butterfingers
Conception————————— Score bar
Sleepless Nights ——————— Now & Later or Rocky Road or Good n Plenty
Uh Oh! It’s a (opposite gender)– Shockers

It’s a girl or Baby Girl ————    Baby Ruth
Child genius ————————– Smarties
College cost/hospital bills———  100 Grand
Breastfeeding————————- Milky Way
Sex Life before Baby—————  Good n Plenty
Sex Life after Baby—————— Zero
Triplets ——————————– 3 Musketeers
Fat Baby——————————- Chunky bar
Only 3 pushes———————–  Reece’s Fast Break
Boy’s Names ———————— Mike & Ike
Umbilical Cord ———————   Red Rope
Tummy after Pregnancy———-  Jelly Belly
How Mom feels after Labor—-    Carefree gum
Baby’s name?———————– Whatchamacallit”
(Mom’s name)———————– Mamba
Grandmas—————————– Lifesavers
Bottle————————————Bottle Candy
Pacifier———————————-Ring Pop
Labor & Delivery——————–  Push Pop or Rocky Road bar
Pictures of Baby———————-Mentos
Baby Fat——————————–Rolos
Baby or (Baby’s name)————  Junior Mints
Little Boys (if having a boy)—–   Gummy worms
Little Girls (if having a girl)——-  Chiclets gum or sugar babies
Colicky Baby               ————  Cry Babies
Laundry ——————————- Mounds

Strawberry Shortcake Party!

May 18, 2013Mellu 1 Comment

Welcome to Berry Bitty City!

Strawberry, strawberry, strawberry shortcake! The song is still in my head 3 weeks later! LOL This party turned out cute, but I wasn’t on top of things as I normally am (I have to start months early for the April birthdays since we have 2 of them and I ordered the stuff early, but didn’t get to the crafting part early enough) … so it was a little stressful at the end. But it all worked out and my daughter had a great time! We had about 16 kids or so this time. The kids arrived and started on a coloring sheet/maze activity, then we played some games, had some cake and she opened her presents.

Strawberries are cut from the Hello Kitty cricut cartridge.

My wonderful older daughters did all the coloring of the dots with some sharpie markers! We just taped on the leaves and stem. (warning… don’t let your kids play with these balloons when you take them down… the sharpie comes off everywhere… TRUST me!)

Strawberry confetti from birthday express, Table cloth from oriental trading. The maize printout and coloring sheets are from the strawberry shortcake website.

My grandma crocheted these Strawberry shortcake dolls for me when I was a kid and I still had them. They are amazing and worked great for centerpieces!

balloons from birthday express

This was a HUGE decoration that worked great for filling up a wall! And only $6 at birthday express

Images from google and bing image search. Again… make sure you go to advanced search and search only for images with a high resolution to look better with printing!

This piñata was an idea I found on Pinterest from Grey Luster girl. She is amazing at parties and had a lot of fun ideas!
I did make it into a pull string piñata because my girls prefer them. (my string broke this time though… which was a bummer). For instructions on making a pull string piñata see HERE

Strawberry Shortcake pin the strawberry on the vine game from Shindigz

Birthday girl!!

I made a bunch of these out of felt and we used them to play a musical chairs game. Most of the kids have never played that before and were not happy about me taking them away. LOL. But it was fun to watch them figure it out.

We had strawberry shortcake music in the background! You know… the ones that are still in my head! (there are a lot of different strawberry shortcake albums available… we liked the Strawberry Jams and Let’s Dance the best.)

For the food, we had strawberry applesause, Strawberries, dried strawberries, Chocolate wafers, Pretzel thins, homemade suckers, cupcakes, and beverages. Most things are from Trader Joes.

I love making candy! It is a pretty fast process if you have all the right tools. I bought this hard candy mold from sugarcraft. I also recommend getting the large candy funnel… Works great! THIS was a helpful blog when I first started to make candy (without my mom, that is)!

chocolate cupcakes

I made a simple buttercream frosting with powdered sugar and butter (but I only used about 1/2-2/3 as much sugar as the recipe called for) and I added strawberry flavoring to it. Oh man.. it was so yummy!

Remember these? I don’t think I ever did say how I made them… They are from the flower shoppe cricut cartridge… probably my most used cartridge! So many things you can use flowers for! Anyway, you use a fancy pearl pin to pin them to the Styrofoam ball topiary. (Be sure to store them out of the sun when you aren’t using them because the colors can fade)

Enjoying some goodies!

Ok… there were so many fun favors to do this time… I may have gotten a little carried away. It was still under $5 per kid though which is my max. 🙂

So, I bought THIS cricut cartridge just for this party and it made the 3D strawberries in the basket and the basket. So fun! Inside the 3D strawberries are strawberry daiquiri jelly bellies. And also in the basket there is a packet of strawberry flavored Annies fruit snacks and strawberry Kelloggs pastry crisps.

These mini hand sanitizers are from bath and body works and I tried to find the fruity scents and just make my own label for them in Photoshop, printed on sticky paper and stuck them on! 🙂

Also there are coloring books and bubble wands ($1 each at Michaels).

Ice cream party!

May 17, 2013Mellu 1 Comment

Ice cream birthday party

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ICE CREAM! Actually the screaming didn’t get too loud! 🙂 Ok.. I’ll be honest, I never really know what to say in these intros, but sometimes I feel like I need to introduce each party! 🙂 Bla bla bla… I’m more of a picture person myself, so let’s just get right to the fun stuff! 🙂

First up the decorations:

I sorta threw this together last minute… I had made a large crocheted ball a few months ago as part of an experiment that didn’t work out. And I had some of those cardboard like cones from Michaels from a previous party… so I hot glued on a ribbon hanger and rubber banded the tulle over my crocheted ball and shoved it in the cone. Would have been cute with some beads glued on top for sprinkles.

inflatable cone… what I am going to do with this after the party?

So, I painted this cone for a game, but realized it was too small… so it just became a decoration.

(Ice cream try number too for pin the cherry on the sundae)

to make ice cream cone garland… see THIS blog post

I saw these cute ice cream balloons on Pinterest, so I tried them… they are helium filled balloons, but what I found out was that the weight of the cone (paper) was so heavy that they wouldn’t stay up in a bouquet… so I just tied them tightly to each chair and that worked. Still a fun idea though… if you try this with a lighter weight paper and it works, let me know.

I ran out of time to make a piñata, so I bought this at our local party store… I think it may have been the first time we used a piñata that wasn’t a pull string one… it was interesting! (my girls are not much into hitting with a bat)

This was one of the games. I had 4 buckets and filled 2 of them with some pom poms I made with this brilliant contraption. And I bought these cute ice cream scoopers. So, the game was a relay type race… there were 2 lines of kids and they had to scoop a ball of “ice cream” and run across the room to the empty bucket and drop it in and run back, then the next kid goes. Which ever line finishes first wins. We played a few rounds of this. It was a nice calm active game for them!

I may do a blog post about this game too. Have you all heard of the Cupcake game? It is a super cute easy game for kids. I spent a bunch of time creating a game like it, but it was making an ice cream cone or sundae instead. 5 kids could play at each game, so I made 4 games total. I will link to the post after I blog about that.

Pin the cherry on top of the Sundae!

I found this cake pop kit on clearance at Michaels and it was just perfect for the party. It was pretty easy to make… the instructions were well written and they looked adorable.

lot of syrups!

Lots of toppings!

and MORE toppings! (I am always happy when I get to use this fun ferris wheel serving piece from what used to be Southern Living at Home.)

Here are those finished cake pops

popcorn cones

ice cream bowls from Oriental Trading

We had a ton of different cones, but the majority just wanted to use the fun bowls. The plates and napkins were from Birthday Express

I had my helpers (sis and mom-in-law) pre-scoop the ice cream onto a cookie sheet and stuck it in the freezer. Then when it was time to serve… we dumped them into bowls and they were ready to go. This was super helpful and make things fast and not as messy!

chocolate chip mint

and vanilla

She didn’t want a cake, so candles went into the ice cream scoop! 🙂

party favors (in the green bucket there are THESE ice cream shooters for the boys)

These party pails were from oriental trading and they had the idea HERE

inside the pails there was Ice cream scented nail polish, tattoos, ice cream lip gloss and stickers. (just the sticker and tattoos in the boy’s favors)

Note: on the instructions from Oriental trading… the didn’t say anything about how they got the blue / purple/etc color under the iridescent glitter… I just hot glued on some ribbon of the same color and then glued the glitter stuff on top!

Happy birthday sweet girl!

How to make ice cream cone garland

April 17, 2013Mellu 1 Comment

Ice cream cone garland

I thought I would show you a tutorial to make some fairly quick ice cream cone garland for an ice cream party!

What you need:

tissue paper in the colors you want

6″ X 8″ brown paper (I used cardstock, but lighter paper will work just as well)

2″ Styrofoam balls (you can find them cheap at the dollar store)

hot glue gun

fish line

scissors

Making the cone:

Take your brown paper

start to roll it into a cone with the corner at the point as shown above

hot glue a strip down the edge. I glued the top half first while holding the point and then glued the pointy part around tight.

Here you can see the glued part better. then cut around the top to cute off the excess and make it straight.

Adding the top:

Cover your Styrofoam ball with a bit of tissue paper and twist the ends together.

Put a little hot glue around the inside rim of your cone and insert the twisted end of your covered Styrofoam.

Cut a long strip of tissue paper about 1.5-2 inches wide and fold it down the center lengthwise

Start gluing on your strip of tissue down the fold and slightly above and below the fold, bunching it as you go.

all the way around and hide the ends into the start

Lastly, cut a small piece of fishing line, bring the ends together and put hot glue on the ends, and poke it into a small hole into the top for hanging.

cute cute

Girl baby shower

February 21, 2013Mellu Leave a comment

One more baby shower from a long time ago. It was nothing fancy and I just have a few pictures from this one. I will just post some pictures. 🙂

Invitations I had to hand cut these… in my pre-Cricut days.

This topiary was given to the new mommy for the nursery. The flowers are paper and they were made from my Cuttlebug die cut machine.

This fruit bowl wasn’t easy to do, but I love how it turned out!

Guess the baby game!

These were another gift to the momma-to-be. I had everyone put their addresses on envelopes and gave her these thank you cards for easy baby shower thank you notes!

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Author: Mellu

40th birthday party for my husband

My Little Pony Party

Lalaloopsy birthday party

Fall Baby Shower

Outer Space Baby Shower

Baby Shower Memory Game

Strawberry Shortcake Party!

Welcome to Berry Bitty City!

Ice cream party!

Ice cream birthday party

How to make ice cream cone garland

Ice cream cone garland

Girl baby shower

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Welcome to Berry Bitty City!

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Ice cream birthday party

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Ice cream cone garland

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