Owl birthday party!

Well, its April again, so we just celebrated the 1st of 2 birthdays.  My 5 year old was looking through the list of party themes from the Birthday Express catalog, and she loved the owl blossom party supplies, so we went with that theme.  I started by crocheting amigarumi owls for decorating the room (Ravelry has a ton of cute patterns).  After deciding on my upcoming 3 year olds party theme, we got our orders together for birthdayexpress.com and orientaltrading.com.  I just love getting all those fun supplies in the mail! 

Last week, we had 16 little party friends come to have a hoot at our Owl party.  My little birthday girl had a lot of fun and we even got a sunny day!  Here are the pictures: 

Had trouble with this flipping in a bit.  😦  Oh well
Love these wall stickers from birthdayexpress!  And I can now move them to a bedroom for a cutsie wall


When the kids arrived, we started with a craft:  painting owl suncatchers.  I found these great markers from JoAnns to use instead of paints.  Was super easy for a 5 year old to do, but they do like to glob it on, so it did take a while to dry. 
Owl aprons to put on to protect their clothes from paint!

Next up, I printed and glued this own onto some cardboard… cut the mouth hole out and the kids had a beanbag toss into the owls mouth.

My mom helped by making these super cute bean bag mice out of felt, string tail and a pompom nose.

Decorations over the food
food display… saw the idea for the wood displays and platter stands on pinterest!

we had some allergy kids coming to the party, so I tried to make sure we had things they could have!

Gluten free rice krispie cupcakes

Don’t you just love cupcake cakes?

the betty crocker butter chocolate cake mix was SUPER yummy…  I recomend you try!! and I don’t even usually like chocolate cake!)

Was thrilled to see this on orientaltrading (they were for Valentines, so I even got them on clearance!)

Oh … and happened to find these owl label stands in the dollar section at JoAnns!

pinata

presents
party favors
the boys got a wallet and the girls got an owl purse and they got to keep their aprons, suncatchers, and loot from the pinata.
After the party, the kids got to go outside and play to burn off some sugar.  🙂  Again… super thankful for the sunny day!  Happy birthday sweet girl!

Owl baby shower for a girl

I suppose some of you remember when I did an owl baby shower last year for my friend’s baby boy?  Well, recently I hosted another owl shower for a little girl and it looked completely different!!  It was such a fun shower to do because my friend just adopted a baby girl, so the little one was able to come to her own baby shower and it was just such a sweet time celebrating this wonderful act of love and redemption. 

The inspiration for the shower was the crib bedding they chose for the nursery from Pottery Barn Kids here.  I have to thank Renee, Katy, Meghan, and Lisa for helping me with the food, supplies and decorations.  I didn’t even have to do any of the food prep, so I am very thankful for that!

banner thanks to the handy Cricut!  🙂
I love this shot of the guests of honor chatting on the chair!  It is precious.
Renee painted this lovely design on the wood letters and also the bird houses.  The branches, birds and 2 owls are printed on cardstock, cut and taped to pictureshelves (or wall). 

 

So cute, right?


Found this adorable owl at a local gift shop!




The food table


The topiaries were made by painting ceramic pots, inserting a piece of styrofoam in the bottom (covered up with some dried filling stuff), painted wooden dowel, the top is a styrofoam ball (I did paint this a quick covering of pink before I started)covered with paper flowers and leaves (cricut flower shop cartridge) and attached with a pearl stick pin.

The little ceramic birds are from Finland

Love these plates/napkins from Party Pail

Great idea Meghan to put fruit into krumkake shells

These petit fours were amazing!

Thanks Trader Joes

Lisa’s bacon wrapped dates

Chicken yummy on pitas

Lisa made these super cute chocolates for party favors

And the sweet Maya herself!  Such a precious gift from God!!  Welcome sweet little one!

We had a hoot! (Owl Themed baby shower)

So, last weekend I hosted a baby shower for my bestie.  She is going to have a boy in August!  It was probably the most fun baby showers I have planned so far.  There are a lot of cute ideas for owl themed stuff out there, but actually most were geared toward girls (AKA pink)  and others were more “barn owl” style, which is a little too flea market like for what I was looking for.  But I still did get a lot of great ideas from my online research. 
So after the date was decided, I got the guest list from the momma-to-be and saw that it was 59 people… so, first thing on my to do list was to recruit help!  So, thanks to 5 other wonderful ladies, I had enough help to make this an awesome shower for her.  I did most of the decor and party favors while the other ladies took care of all the food, games, prizes and other random details.  So, thanks again to Michelle, Rachel, Sarah, Ursula, and Christy for helping me!

Anyway… I suppose you’d like to see the pictures now, huh?  Here goes:

Banner made from paper and buttons and some garden twine.  (idea from here)

I found these awesome hanging decorations here.  They were pretty easy to make.  The large ones take 12 sheets of 12X12 paper… the small ones that I made are  5 1/2″ diameter.
close up detail

Printed out these branches (actually 4 sheets, glued together) and covered my picture frame shelves with them.  I am really happy with how they turned out and it was such an easy way to add to the decor.  The green owl is also a printout.  Thanks to a friend, I was able to borrow some owl things (top shelf) and found a couple crochet patterns online and made a couple more.)
Crocheted owl … pattern found HERE

Another crocheted owl… HERE is the pattern
The tables

Owl printout (2 sheets glued together to be double sided) and I didn’t glue the bottom, so that it could just sit in the branches.

Gorgeous owl vase borrowed from a friend

Borrowed Owl Pitcher
Borrowed stuffed owl

One of the games
Napkins

Michelle made the super cute food labels and the food was amazing!  sooo yummy

Adorable owl cupcakes

These are the party favors.  I sewed these little owls sorta using THIS idea (original pattern here), but redesigned the pattern a little to make them able to open … and used a small piece of velcro to hold the beaks shut.  Then I made some homemade caramel corn to fill them with (in little baggies) … I just used up buttons from my collection, so each owl was one of a kind.
Lastly, here are some other links for ideas:

SUPER cute Owl purse

So there you go!  Congrats Angie and can’t wait to meet the new little guy!