Miss had such a fun party yesterday. She asked for a Brave-themed party, and I ran with that, keeping it a bit more archery-focused than princess-focused. I have a little bit of a Pinterest obsession, and I found lots of cute ideas, though I ended up mostly just using my own.
The plan for the party started with the realization that, since it was on a weekday evening and we would be having it at my house, a movie party (and a small guest list) would be a great idea. With the movie being Disney’s “Brave,” of course. I remembered seeing little cars made into boxes for a “drive-in movie” party, so I went with that. It went over even better than I thought it would (I couldn’t find a tutorial for making the boxes, so I’ll share how I did it in a later post here. I know you can’t wait).
I kind of wasn’t expecting the kids to actually sit in the boxes. They didn’t sit in them for the whole movie, of course, but for at least 30 minutes or so they did. After that it was chaos and the boxes were vroomed all over, filled up with toys, and crushed, but that’s okay.
For a movie party of course one has to serve popcorn, so I bought these cute little popcorn boxes and decoupaged the Clan DunBroch symbol on them.
I didn’t realize until after I was done that I put it on upside down on all but one.
One of the decorating ideas I was most excited about was making “will-o’-the-wisps” for our front walk. In the movie, Merida follows these to her “destiny,” so I came up with the idea of making some for a cool decoration. I put a battery-operated tea light into some blue tissue paper along with a few marbles to keep them from blowing away and set them on white paper plates in the snow. They didn’t turn out quite as cool as I wanted, largely because it wasn’t dark out when guests arrived.
But I still liked them, and they did look pretty when everyone left.
I found these fun “medieval” goblets for the table (and for the kids to each take home), so I got gold plates to go with them and blue forks and napkins to be “wisp-like” again. The goblets actually come half with pink and blue gems and half with green and blue, with was a happy surprise for me since we had our favorite boy guest in attendance.
Of course I couldn’t possibly throw a party without some fun find from Etsy. I found a cute banner, which Miss loved.
And I also got these bow and arrow charms to make necklaces.
I got them, along with some cotton thread and some beads from Hobby Lobby (and also these charms which I didn’t use this time), with the idea that I could let the kids make their own necklaces during the party. But then I decided that the movie, pizza, cake, presents, and archery (which Miss said she really wanted to do) would take up enough time. So I just made one necklace for each guest. I thought Miss could give them out as the guests came in, like we did with the horse tails at Lass’s party, but she didn’t want to wear hers and wasn’t really into handing them out, so I just put them in the favor bags.
Also in the favor bags were small bows with arrows for each guest (these came with little knives too, but I ditched those) and a Brave tattoo.
At the end of the shindig, the kids each took turns shooting Miss’s bow, which was the highlight of the evening for me (and seemingly for many of them). They all seemed to enjoy it, and Miss really wanted to include this as part of the party.
I am so please with how everything turned out.
^^When I asked her what she wanted for her birthday dinner she said, “pizza and green beans,” so each guest got some fresh green beans with their pizza!
Everyone seemed to have fun.
The planning and crafting is a fun perk for me of having kids’ birthday parties. There were even a few things I didn’t have time to do (I got a cupcake stand but didn’t have time to decorate and put it together, and I got some paper targets and mod-podged them to some foam core boards but didn’t have time to cut them out and put them up). But obviously, the most important thing is that my girl and her guests had a good time. And they did.
Today I’m taking my five-year-old to her first piano lesson and to get a library card.
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