Party Preparations

Happy Birthday Emmy Rose & Lilah Asenith!

We went with a rainbow theme this year. Can you tell?? This was the front of our invitations. I used Vistaprint's Over-sized Postcards. I was very happy with the color quality and how they turned out and feel I got a decent deal. 50 was the minimum order quantity and they were "free" but after you add on all the extras plus shipping they were $25.

Their shirts were hand appliqued with felt by myself and then my mother in law used a running stitch to put the girl's name and age on the clouds. Normally I hate clothing or backpacks or anything with a child's name on it for safety reasons, but I made an exception this time. It was like the cloud was saying....write something on me....do it now!! haha

How super cute are their hair bows!! They both really liked them and I think we'll get lost of use out of these since they have so many colors in them. Emmy's really into the big hair bows now. The bigger the better is what I think she thinks and Lilah doesn't like to leave the house with out them in. If I forget to clip on a hair bow she will grab her hair and make her 'eehh eehh' sound.

We even found some rainbow earrings at Big W! They really thought that was special to change out their normal jewelry for the party ones!!

I customized their cups with their names on them. I ordered the stickers through Vistaprint as well. This was the only free picture they had with a rainbow. I would have had to pay an upload fee to use the invitation photo and honestly I think the unicorn is pretty darn cute. At the time of ordering these we were suppose to have a pony at the party, so the unicorn was on the same path, but some unexpected troubles came up so we changed party directions and went with a Rainbow Fairy.

I had alot of fun with the goodie bags this year! I used card stock, a scalloped punch, and a 2"circle punch to do the job along with cellophane bags.

They were filled with lolly pops, gum balls, taffy, powder candy, balloons, necklaces, and stickers.

Of course I had to try out my new handmade by me stamp!! I love how it turned out and was well worth the ebay purchase.

Here we are making our Rainbow Cupcakes. I used boxed cake mix and gel food colorings. Each layer was about 1.5-2 tsp per color. The girls were so delighted with the colors and as you can see they kept showing me while they were eating them hehe.

How pretty!

uummm yummy!

I like how you can see the rainbow layers through the paper. I've seen rainbow cupcakes that others have done online and their paper is nearly see through and it really makes a dramatic effect. I'm not sure if it's a special kind of paper or if it's just really thin and happens to be a positive side effect of poor quality papers. If anyone has the answer to that I'd love for you to leave a comment and let me know!

How cool is that wrapper!

Here's the cake all assembled and ready for icing. I had no idea what I was doing when I made this and I've never ever made a layered cake before. I wanted the icing in between the layers to not show white so I colored it to match the layer below. From this picture you can see how bright all the layers turned out except for the purple....it looks brown on the outside, but don't worry. It turned out the prettiest and brightest purple ever on the inside! Over all my layers baked very flat after a tip I found on you tube. I'll share that with you. If you are using a metal pan then all you do is cut a long piece of towel the same height as your pan. Wet it down and wring it out then wrap it tightly around your pan then bake as normal. It keeps the temp of the pan more even allowing the cake to bake at a more of an even temperature.

I really wish I had a better picture of the cake before it started to crack from the weight. I had a bit of an icing nightmare and I'm still not sure what the heck happened. It was suppose to be fluffy and very 'peaky' if that's a way to describe it. Instead I ended up with play-doh like icing that I had to mold onto the cake. When I tried to smooth it out it would just come off in large pieces. Running late and only hours from the parties start time I was beginning to freak out. My mother in law saved the day by suggesting that we press shredded coconut all over it for a nice textured effect. Brilliant!!

I made the candied rainbow decoration out of a giant lollipop. I slammed it down on the counter top and then arranged the broken pieces onto some baking paper and warmed it slowly in the oven on a low temp. I watched it closely and when it was melted just enough to hold it's shape I pulled it out and let it cool. Perfect!

I wanted the cake to be white, very plain and unimpressive on the outside....and I think I more than achieved that...ekkk! My wow factor was on the inside with all the colors. I so wish that my icing would have not melted away like it did, but that's what happens when you have warm weather and an icing mishap! I also should have used skewers through the cake to give it some support because after a little while of being cut it eventually gave into gravity and fell over. At least it tasted good! I think in the future I'll stick with fondant. I've never had anything go wrong with fondant decorating and it's more predictable for me. You live and learn!

Would you like to taste the rainbow?? Here's the drinks the kids had to choose from. Cherry, Orange, Lemon-Aid, Green Apple, and Blue Mountain Kool-Aids and Cordials.

I can't believe that I didn't take up close pictures of the Editable Crayons, Cookies on a Stick, or the Lollipop Stand, this cropped mega zoomed in picture will have to do. You know how it gets....so much to do and not enough time to do it in. I really took the time this time around to enjoy myself so the memories will just have to live on in my mind :) You could also see in some of the pictures of the cake the sugar cookies I made with 6 different colors of icing. The Cookies on a Stick were also sugar cookies with gel food colorings mixed into the dough. The lollipops were customized with 2" circles that said Happy Birthday or Rainbow. We also had Gum Balls, Skittles and Rainbow Twizzlers, all the way from America, thanks mom, out for grabs!!

I had so much fun making these! Originally I wanted to use glitter, but when I priced it out it was going to be crazy expensive to fill them all up with different colors so I had to get creative. I came up with the idea to just color plain white sugar. I hot glued the lids on and if by chance one of the children did get it open then it was just sugar and no harm would be done if they ate it. The labels were hand punched and wrote. Way too cute! Can you guess who got to hand out the fairy dust??

Our Rainbow Fairy!! My dear sweet friend Kelsey agreed to dress up as our fairy and she did a wonderful job. She looked beautiful and really did a great job interacting with the children. Thank you so much Kelsey!!

I definitely didn't want to make the pinata again like I did last year so I was over the moon when I found this one! Strange thing was that it didn't have any red on it. It started with orange on the outside. It looked totally weird and not right so I added the red layer myself. I don't think anyone could tell that it didn't come that way!!

Also not pictured is the Fairy Ring we had. Our fairy sat in it for awhile at the beginning of the party as the children arrived and handed out the fairy dust. It was really sweet. I just recycled the toadstools that we made last year. You can see it pictured below or check out how we made them HERE.

Our Fairy Ring from 2010

I also rented a bubble machine and that was alot of fun. It did a pretty good job of keeping us in bubbles the majority of the time, but I wouldn't have complained with it had put out more. I think if you were really wanting to fill all of your party space with bubbles then I'd recommend renting 2-4 for an outside setting.

Our party day was so fun but some of my planning resulted in me being pretty upset when things didn't go as planned and it wasn't coming together like the picture in my head. I really had my heart set on the cute party table with all the children around it with their little party hats on and when our site was occupied by other families we were short on tables and forced to choose another spot. I wanted the balloons to hang in rainbow clusters from the trees and and the beautiful tissue paper pom poms I spent 3 nights making didn't even get hung up for guest to enjoy and just laid at the base of the tree. Because we were short on tables all the presents ended up being tossed under the candy table in a jumbled mess.

No one else would have been bothered by these things or thought that they should be any other way, so when things don't go as planned you must go with the flow. I put so much love and attention into the details and I truly believe that love IS in the details. I know how special and loved I felt growing up when my mom would go that extra mile so I do as much of that as I can because these are the moments are memories are made.

I have alot more birthday pictures and stories to share, but I'll save those for another two posts. Be on the look out for "Our Birthday Morning" and "Our Party".