Plain Clothes Hipsters: Creative Birthday Parties

For the 3 year old birthday party, we had a Daniel Tiger themed party, on a beautiful sunny day. We were able to keep all of the kiddos (and most of the adults) playing outside in the yard, on the deck and in the new sandbox (a birthday gift from Papa). I took so many pictures of this party that I can't fit all of it in one post. So this post I will discuss the decorations, the next post I will discuss the food.

Decorations:

As I said in previous posts, I took a trip to Kinkos to print banner parts, goody bag labels and tags, table tents and activity sheets. I actually took a second trip to Kinkos and still forgot to print something (thanks to my brother-in-law for printing it for me)!

From the PBS-Kids website, I printed coloring pages and mask cut-outs for activities to keep little hands busy.

The goody bags had crayons (Episode 109: A Trip to the Enchanted Garden/ A Trip to the Crayon Factory), bubbles (Episode 117: Good Morning Daniel/ Goodnight Daniel), a Hot Wheels car (Episode 110: Daniel Shares his Tigertastic Car/ Katerina Shares her Tutu) and some candy. I used washi tape to close the bags and attach the labels (I used a lot of washi tape this year).

Also from PBS-Kids, I printed pre-made banner circles and hung them a couple of different ways.

I also made my own banner circles with my Creative Memories software and printed them out to make a banner. I had to get out some old-school CM tools to cut out the circles and the mattes. Ah good times. String the circles together with some ribbon, and, voila, you have a banner.

EG really loved all of the character banners. We put them up a few days early and she kept naming all of the characters (including "my 3") and pointing out where each character was around the house. The decoration she was most excited about was rainbow colored streamers (Episode 123: The Dragon Dance/ Teacher Harriet’s Birthday - her favorite favorite episode). She liked to organize them in rainbow order in the packages and couldn't wait until I put them up. We hung them from ceiling to counter (with washi tape) using them to hide stuff that we didn't get to putting away before the party started.

All of the plates, napkins and table coverings were from the dollar store. Most of the streamers were also from the dollar store, but I had to purchase the colors not available there at a party supply store. The forks and cake plates were still left over from our wedding, but we finally had to purchase more plastic cups, the wedding supply is gone.

I also pulled out all of my little bottle vase collection and filled them with pomp mums that look like mini-sunflowers. I added one vase of real sunflowers too (Episode 131: Neighbor Day).