Arts and Crafts Birthday Party

On August 27th, our little girl turned 3! I wanted to make a special birthday party for her (her first party with friends). Pinterest provided an overwhelming amount of ideas but I was drawn to the painting/crafty parties. My daughter, like me, loves to do crafty things so I thought this would be right up her alley. I adapted some ideas from various posts and, for the life of me, can't remember all the websites so I won't post any here. I think mine is different enough to be unique but you be the judge. :)

These are the party invitations - paint sample cards! :)

    

The yard was decorated with helium balloons (great deal on those at Target!). :)

We made a banner out of old paint cans. I made the letters for her name in Microsoft Word and taped them to the paint cans. Then I used various coloured crepe paper streamers to attach to the paint cans to make it look like paint was spilling out. Due to the size of her name and the paint cans, it had to go over on to the gate and since the gate was being used for guests to enter the party, I couldn't attach the Happy Birthday banner to the gate. Looks a little wonky having it shorter than the name part but it's still cute. :)

Our picnic table was the refreshment table, labelled "Artist Snacks". I got these little easels with canvas at Dollorama.

Artist Snacks consisted of these paint palette gummy bears, Munchies and lemonade.

Straws were provided for the lemonade. I had a pack a various coloured straws and I attached little cards that said "Annalise is 3!" with a set of 3 paint cans in the background. :)

We had a painting station. Each child got a canvas (also a Dollorama purchase) to paint on. Since a lot of the kids were small and I didn't have sufficient chairs, we just laid the table on the ground and it worked quite nicely.

The painting station...

We also did a craft and, since it was for a birthday party and we were going to be eating cupcakes, it was a cupcake craft. I found some frame templates online, printed them off on various coloured card stock, cut out the centres and glued the frames onto white card stock. This was then the paper they used to make their cupcake craft, using various types of paper (cupcake wrappers, tissue paper, card stock, construction paper, and aluminum foil) and pompoms.

Cupcake Craft table ...

The birthday girl was eager to get started but she had to wait patiently for all her friends to arrive. :)

The original location of the cupcake craft station before we moved it to the shade. For some reason Annalise's birthday ended up being on the hottest day of the year this time around!

Everyone had a great time getting messy and painting! :)

And lots of fun crafting too!

We made an art gallery on the wall at the back of our yard. I made the sign using various paint sample cards and letters printed from Word. The paintings we left on the table to dry and the cupcake craft pictures were taped to the wall (using party tape - sticks to everything and anything but didn't seem to ruin the paper).

Dessert was "painting cupcakes" as Annalise called them. I had planned to use my home-made cupcake wrappers (made out of card stock). I even made the icing colour to match the wrappers but, when the time came to bring out the cake, we realized it was just too much work to attach them all and we were hot and tired. Besides that, Annalise wouldn't really know the difference. So we scrapped the homemade wrapper idea and just served them like this. They were a big hit. I used a super easy butter cream icing recipe from Martha Stewart's website (finally she was right when she labelled it as "easy"!) :)

I got thick foam core boards from Michael's to make these paint palette cupcake trays.

I also had a large canvas (also bought at Dollorama) set up on an easel for adult guests to pain a picture for the birthday girl. I thought I'd let them in on the painting fun too. :) I started with the large yellow flower and the painting grew from there! :) I'm very pleased with how it turned out and once we have a hook on it, we'll hang it on Annalise's wall. What a beautiful way to remember her birthday! :)

Well, in the background you can see me leaning over and painting on the large canvas. :)

It was a very enjoyable party but very, very busy day! It was exhausting! :) Annalise still talks about it. We'll see what we do next year for her birthday party but up next (in 2 months) is Emilie's 1st birthday so we'll focus on that first. I'm thinking "Stripes" will be a good theme and work nicely for a cake smash photo shoot. :)