My love for planning birthday parties

I love planning for birthday parties. At our house birthday planning usually starts late August to September for our two birthdays in October. Then we deal with all the holiday stuff just to turn around to start planning again for our February and March birthdays.

I love it when they think of a theme on their own and they get major brownie points it they think of themes in advance. I could spend months coming up with ideas to match a theme.

Lea is going to get major brownie points for her next idea (if she doesn't change her mind considering her birthday isn't until March). She told me, a week or so ago, that she wants a bubbles birthday party. Oh the ideas that are turning in my head. I can't wait till I have time to sit down and start looking for ideas. So be on the look out. I will be posting things as I find them.

Chinese New Year Party: The finale

Well Mia's party was a huge success. Here are some pictures from the party

 

When you walked into the front door this is what you were meet with.

When I do parties I usually have a schedule of what we are going to do in what order. This time I just laid every thing in a row in the middle of the table and started out by telling them everything I had planed and then I let them choose what they wanted to do. This worked out so well because I usually feel so stressed about getting everything done and going from one thing to the next that I don't ever enjoy the party myself. This time I was just able to go with the flow and they all had lots of fun.

 

Here is every one painting their New Year banners.

Coloring their dragon masks. 

If you look you can see the Chinese yo-yos wrapped in the rubber band.

 

The birthday girl. She is really concentrating.

Everyone in there dragon masks.

Here is everyone playing the chopstick game. This was a lot harder than I thought it would be but they still thought it was fun. You can see all of them smiling.

Blowing out her candles. We put two candles in to represent 11. You can see what the cupcakes look like here.

Not all her friends that she invinted could make it but the important ones where there.

Thanks mom for letting me have the party at your house and for helping out. Love you bunches!!

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Chinese New Year Party: Games and goody bags

In this post I am going to list what I have planned for the games and goody bags that will have at Mia's Chinese New Year party. Since the party was originally planed for the day before valentines day you will see some of that mixed in.

Here are the games.

All the games that I have planned came from a site called Activity Village.

The first game that I will tell you about is The chopstick game.

 I got the idea from here. We will be using these for the game.

I also want to mention that I got the chopsticks from Skybluepink.com. If you scroll down you will see that you can get 10 for $1 which is a great price unless you can get them free from a local Chinese restaurant. I just want to mention that Skybluepink has tons of other Asian inspired stuff and also their shipping prices were very low and they are a wonderful company to work with (Sadly I feel the need to mention that I was NOT paid for my opinion).

The next game on the list is Catch the dragon's tail (I have also heard it called Catch the snake's tail). This is a very fun group game and you can find the directions here.

The last game on the list is Throwing the square which I believe is a traditional Chinese game. Here are the directions for the game. I actually made a set for everyone to take home in their goody bags but I will explain more about that later.

Before everyone leaves the party we will pop these.

Fire crackers are a bid deal when celebrating the new year. Since those are out of season here in the U.S.  I think these would be a good substitute.

Here is what we are including in the goody bags.

For the goody bags (well actually boxes) we are using take out boxes. We searched everywhere for either red or gold boxes but the closest thing we could find was this

 

I don't know it you can tell or not but it is covered with pink and red hearts. We found these at Michaels on sell for $.98 a piece. They don't exactly go with our theme but they will do and I got a good deal on them so what more can you ask for the week before Valentine's Day.

One of the things that they are going to be able to take home with them is a set of chopstick that we will be using at the party to play a game with.

I will be including a set of throw the square for them to take home.

It is just a 24" x 12" piece of fabric with a line drawn the middle. I used something called fray check around the edges so that I wouldn't have to hem it.

For the bean bags I just used yellow craft felt and with fabric paint drew the symbols for tiger (on the left) and dragon (on the right).

At my local Walmart they sell boxes of fortune cookies so I just picked some up to include.

Something else that I will be including is Party Poppers

I found the idea and wonderful directions from Little Birdie Secrets. I made these with yellow tissue paper and wrapped in red wrapping paper with red ribbons. I found the cracker snaps at Olde English Crackers for $4.25 for 25 of them. There shipping is very reasonable and fast.

We will be filling the poppers with these

The last thing that will be included are the famous Red Envelope. 

There are a lot of different ideas out there but I liked this one from Activity Village the best. It even includes a template. At Chinese New Year it is traditional for parents and elders to give gifts of "lucky money" to children and unmarried adults.  The money, which can vary from a small, new coin to a substantial sum, is always presented in a red envelope. We looked everywhere for chocolate coins but couldn't find any so we are settling for these.

 

they have a dragon on one side and a Chinese symbol on the other. I got these at Skybluepink.com for 36 for $1.00. I think I read somewhere that you are supposed to include an even number of coins for luck.

Well that is it for the Chinese New Year Party. Hope you enjoyed it.

Chinese New Year Party: Cupcakes and crafts

Ok so technically Chinese New Year was last weekend, as was Mia's birthday, but Friday night we got about 6-8" of snow and here in Eastern NC that put everything to a standstill. So we had to reschedule for this weekend. I think I was more disappointed in that than Mia was although I did get an extra week to prepare. She's fine as long as she gets her party. Still I think the Chinese celebrate the New Year for 15 days so we are still good lol. So I thought I would just run through the list of things we have planned for the party.

Here are the cupcakes that I am making for the party.

 

I got the idea from FamilyCorner.com

Here are the crafts we will be doing

Making Chinese Yo-Yos

 

I posted how we will make these here.

We are also planning on making a Chinese New Year banner

 

Got the idea and directions from Gracenotes.

Another craft we will be making is a dragon mask. You can find the printout here. We will be attaching red streamers to the back on the top so that when the kids are wearing the mask the streamers will flow over their head and behind them and when they run around the streamers will flow out. Haven't tried it yet so I hope it is not one of those things that works perfect in my mind and tanks when we actually do it.

The last craft I have planned is a 3D paper tiger (since it is the year of the tiger).

I found the directions here with a few other zodiac animals. They have the directions and the printout.

Next: games and activities

Chinese New Year Party: Chinese Yo-Yo

Mia has just decided that she wants Chinese yo-yos to go into the goody bags at her party. Well looking around I can't find any and it is too late to order some to be shipped here by Saturday. So what do we do? We make our own of course. There are several sites that I got info from. Making Friends has great instructions and also here at the b-line.

Playing around this is what I did.

At Making friends they said to cut the wrapping paper 7' by 4" and the b-line said to cut it 3' by 8".

I tried to cut my wrapping paper 7' but that was just to much paper and it didn't bounce back good and I didn't want something as big as 8" so I went with 3' by 4" and it worked great.

All the directions I read said to use a wooden dowel. Since I am trying to keep things more cost effective I decided to use long lollipop sticks. Here is a picture of a regular and a long stick together. The long one is about 8" and since you can get 50 or so for just a couple of dollars compaired to maybe 5 dowels for $3-$4 dollars it is a lot cheaper.

note: if you are going to make a bigger yo-yo you will probably need a 12" wooden dowel.

Using my 1/4" Terrifically Tacky Tape I put a strip at one end of the paper. You could also use hot glue if you wanted to.

I wrapped the end with the tape onto the stick.

 

Then I started rolling it up.

 

Once I had it rolled up all the way I put a rubber-band around it and let it "cure" for about 30mins to an hour.

 

All thats left to do is play with it.

Now, not only do we have something for the goody bag but we also have a craft to do at the party. I love it when things can double-up. I just need to go out and find some Asian style wrapping paper and we are all set.

more Chinese party ideas to come...

Chinese New Year Party: Invites

Mia is turning 11 on the 13th of this month. She decided a few months ago that she wanted some kind of Asian themed party. Once I started looking for ideas I found out that the Chinese New Year falls on February 14th so I thought that would be perfect. Once I told her about it she agreed and was very excited.

So for every party you have to start with the invites because those have to be out at least a week (optimally 2 weeks) before the party. As I was looking for ideas for the invatations I came across this tutorial at alphamom.com showing you how to make your own fortune cookies. Nothing is more fun than cracking open a fortune cookie to find the fortune inside so why not put party info in one to hand out as invites. Not to mention that I like giving invites that have a wow factor. (check out the rainbow party invites)

First I printed out the party info on slips of paper. In MS Publisher I made a box 4" x  5/8". Using the font Seven Monkey Fury I typed out You're Invited to Mia's Chinese New Year Birthday Party on the front and on the back I put in the party info.

Then I made the cookies according to the tutorial except I made mine a little over 4" instead of 5". They are very easy to make once you get the hang of it. As I made my cookies I put the party fortune inside.

 

Then I found a pattern for a Chinese take-out box here. They have a bunch of patterned templets but I just used the blank one at the bottom of the page and printed them on red paper. 

I used brads on the sides to hold it together. I printed a little tag to put the guests name on and took a piece of 8" wire and looped the ends around the brad after slipping on the tag.

 

Then I put in a little bit of plastic wrap and put in  my cookie. Just a note here: if you make your cookies much bigger than 4" then they will not quite fit into the take-out box. 

When the kids get their cookies/invites I hope that they enjoy the wow factor.

Stay tuned more party ideas to come...

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Rainbow Birthday Party part 5 goody bags

Here you can find part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

Who doesn't like to leave a party with a goody bag.

I covered some of the things that I am going to put in the goody bag in part 1.

Like this

and this

and this

Here are some other things I am going to add to the goody bag.

I found these at Charlotte's fancy. Zoe is excited about these. She had been wanting an iPod nano since her sister got one back in February. My husband and I are thinking about getting her one for her birthday. A pink one of course.

These party favors are made with a pack of crackers wrapped up like a present but, as Molly stated on Charlotte's fancy, crackers would be a disappointing discovery and maybe something like a Kit-Kat would be better. Soon the Halloween candy will be put out and I am sure I can find some kind of candy bar that is the right size. I can even use the small bars of Kit-Kat's to do this with.

One more thing that I want to add is this

which I found at Chica and Jo's site. They give full directions on how to make these. The only problem is that since I have so many colors to add in I had a hard time with it so I plan on doing this instead

what you do is you take pieces of crayons and you can either line your muffin tin with foil or a cup cake liner or you can use a silicon muffin pan. You then heat your oven to 350° and bake for 10 to 15 minutes. I have a star shaped silicon muffin pan and will use one crayon of each color for each recycled crayon.

This is kind of what they will look like but star shaped of course.

One more thing I want to add is these

I found a site called Oh Nuts! that has all the colors that I need but to get just 2 of each color (which is 14 sticks) they want to charge me over $13 in shipping. Good grief.

I found directions at about.com where they show you how to make homemade rock candy. I guess I am going to have to try it out.

Now I have to have something to put all of these goodies in. I have wracked my brain about this one and I have searched high and low and nothing special has popped out. So what I think I am going to do is take the simplistic approach and do something like this

but instead use white lunch bags and tie it up with curling ribbons of all the colors. I think that would look very pretty.

What do you think?