Adeline wanted a princess fashion party for her fifth birthday and I have to admit, I had a lot of fun planning it for her. I know a lot of people who get annoyed at pinterest parties that go way overboard and have ruined regular (easy) birthday parties. I understand that, but I love to plan stuff like this so I fully admit that I went way overboard. And I'll pat myself on the back a little bit and say that most of my ideas were MY ideas, not found on pinterest! I love having a creative outlet and started planning the party at least a month ahead of time. It was a fun project for me to work on during afternoon naps and quiet time. So before anyone gets annoyed at my over-achiever birthday party, just remember that it was fun and fulfilling of me, as well as Adeline. But we still love the easy parties too!
I still think she seems too little to be 5 already!
Adeline's favorite princesses (when we started planning the party) were Ariel and Aurora, so we went with a pink and teal color scheme. She also wanted a doll cake so badly and luckily, she already had an Ariel doll so I didn't have to buy a new one! We kept the snacks simple (pink lemonade, colorful marshmallows, red and pink starbursts, and popcorn) because that was probably the only simple thing about this party ;)
We started the party coloring and "designing" dresses in fashion design sketch books. I printed off a bunch of black and white sketches of fancy dresses (and some princess sketches as well) and made them into little sketch books for the girls to color as they got to the party.
In order to incorporate Adeline's recent obsession with fashion and dress-ups I sewed each girl a really simple dress-up skirt in a different princess color. I found some awesome disney fashion princess images online and put them on white gift bags with tissue paper to match each skirt. The girls (and Bobby) got to take turns choosing a princess bag and then they all opened them to see their skirts.
Since I had been planning the party way in advance, I made a lot of trips to JoAnn's and Michael's and scoured the clearance racks for fun things for the girls to embellish their skirts with. There were ribbons, flowers, jewels, iron-on appliqués, and all sorts of little knick-knacks. Everyone got to choose things to put on their skirts and Rob got to burn his fingers hot-gluing everything on. I was in charge of the iron-on station, but the girls weren't interested in those as much. Looking back, we should have had a few glue gun stations going and a little extra adult help for this part, but it still worked out. The girls would show off their skirts at the fashion show at the end of the party.
After the skirts were finished, it was time to "design" princess cakes. I made each girl a princess cake (upside-down jumbo cupcake with fondant skirt and a magi-clip doll in it). Then we painted the skirts with food coloring paint and cut out fondant shapes to decorated the skirts with. Thanks so much to my friend Ann for teaching me how to make fondant! This was my first time trying it. Luckily 5 year olds aren't too discerning so they didn't notice that it was an amateur job!
The finished princesses!
Adeline's Snow White.
Bobby chose Cinderella and spent most of his time trying to eat the fondant. We'll have to work on his artistic skills :)
After decorating cakes it was outside to break the piñata. They make these things strong these days and the kids couldn't crack it, so I had to step in to bust it open.
Adeline was so happy to be with her friends!
After the piñata it was time to get dressed up for the fashion show. I found some jewel bracelets and hair braid extensions on clearance and the kids had fun getting all bling-ed up. I invited the parents to come back for the fashion show and cake and ice cream at the end of the party.
The princess lined run-way. Easy decorations, just printed the pictures and glued them to colored paper.
I tried to convince Bobby to let me make him a prince cape instead of a skirt, but he insisted on a skirt! And he really loved learning how to pose on the runway.
We took video of Adeline walking the runway, but didn't get any pictures of her in her skirt! To my surprise, she was very minimalistic when designing her skirt, only adding a ribbon belt at the top and ribbon around the bottom with 1 heart in the middle. She's always very particular about her clothes and this was no exception. We found the Barbie song "Get Your Sparkle On" and it couldn't have been more perfect for the fashion show music. And Adeline is now obsessed with the song and it is always stuck in my head.
After the fashion show it was time for cake and ice cream.
I'm pretty proud of myself with this cake. I had a lot of fun decorating it. I didn't have good food coloring, so the purple looks a little bit gray, but Adeline really wanted purple, so I went with it. Thanks to Ann and lots of youtube videos for helping me learn how to do a cake like this!
Between the princess cupcakes and the big cake, we had tons of cake! Luckily the parents and siblings who were there helped us get rid of some of it, but we still had tons left over for the next couple days!
