Birthday Celebration

I did promise that I'd share pictures from Emma's birthday party...so 2 weeks later, here goes...

After much thought and discussion, Emma went with a Rainbow Fairies theme.  She is a voracious reader and has read through this series of books from Scholastic many, many times.  These books include magic, girl fun, and adventure...right up a 7-year-old's alley.  And, no licensed character plates and decorations allowing me to be imaginative with my decorations sounds great to me!
 
We did go to the website to download pictures of each fairy for the invitations and cupcake toppers, but other than that, we just went colorful!  When Emma was turning 2 or 3, I used scrapbook paper and ribbon I had on hand to make this Happy Birthday banner.  I put it up when any of us are having a birthday.  While it's usually inside, we hung it out by the pool since the colors are so bright and cheery.

Thanks, Dad for holding that up for me!  ;)

Last year, Emma had a polka-dot theme, so we bought some cardboard cake rounds and painted them with different colors of acrylic paint.  I got them out again this year and had the guys hang them with some invisible sewing thread (aka thin fishing line) and tape all around the covered part of our screen enclosure.

The dots that look white or brown in these pictures are just turned in the breeze.  We only painted one side last year!  We also hung 3 Chinese lanterns for decoration too.

For a centerpiece, I laid out some rainbow fabric I've had forever and put out a cut glass bowl filled with gum balls and a rectangular vase filled with skittles and rainbow lollipops my sister picked up for me.  We cut some of our beautiful hydrangeas from the yard and put them out too.  I was going to tie the glasses together with some pretty ribbon but never quite got that far...oh well, they still looked great.

 We just served snacks and drinks since it was in the middle of the afternoon, so I got pint-sized drinks for the kids.  We got these cute little orange soda cans and junior sized Sprites and Cokes.  I threw them all in a big metal drink container.  We put it down on a low shelf so the kids could help themselves.

The kids and parents LOVED the small drinks!

 After having a few swimming parties, I've decided "easy to eat" is the way to go since the kids hate getting out to eat at all.  Trying to dry off, get a plate of cake and ice cream and find somewhere to sit is always a problem, so this year we went for cupcakes and individual ice creams from Bluebell.  When asked, Emma decided she wanted peanut butter and chocolate cupcakes.  Since not everyone is as big a fan of peanut butter as my girl, I made a batch of peanut butter cupcakes with chocolate icing (just use a butter cake mix and use peanut butter instead of butter, or make it from scratch same way) and a batch of chocolate cupcakes with white icing.  We covered the tops with sprinkles to give them a colorful look and then inserted the cake toppers we'd made based on the rainbow fairies.

To make these little toppers I downloaded a coloring sheet of each fairy from the web site and then copied the part of each sheet that featured only the fairy.  Then in my photo editing software I made a circle and placed  tiny circles all around the perimeter of it (this was the most tedious step).  Once the circle design was done, I just copied each fairy into the middle and made it fit and centered it.  Then I colored the circle ring to match and saved it.  I made one for each fairy.  Now the fairies were black and white, so I had Emma color them in when we were all done printing and cutting.  Then I also made some circles with Emma or a 7 on them for the back of each topper.  Once these were made, I opened each image in my Silhouette software and inserted them into a scallop shape and had the machine cut each out.  Then I just sandwiched a colored toothpick between a fairy and either an Emma or 7 and done.  It was almost harder to write this all out then just do it.  I can make a tutorial if anyone is ever interested...

My sister, being the sweet and kind girl that she is, made little fairy wands for each child to take home.  Of course, I told the boys that they could just call it a cookie on a stick if they were too "manly" for fairy wands!  You should have seen their faces light up when they saw them!  She posted the recipe and steps on her blog if you want to check it out.

I gave the kids their cookie wands as they left in their goodie bag.  How cute are these??  Target.  Yep, they've got a big section now with lots of goodie bag stuff.  I am the kind of Mom who despises goodie bags because I really do not need more candy and made-in-China rubber and plastic toys in my house.  But, how can you not give them out?  So our goodie bags are always small and thoughtful.  Each bag had 1 pack of skittles and starburst (so they could taste the rainbow...), some colorful bracelets, a noise maker (like the kind you blow at parties and the paper unrolls) and one or two other knick knacks.

Everyone had a really great time.  We had about 15 kids aged 4-10 swimming, laughing, jumping and hollering at our house and I can't think of a better way to ring in turning 7.  My sweet girl had a great time and all in all, it was a very Happy Birthday!