Curious George Birthday

My daughter LOVES Curious George, and well I love him too, so it was perfect for her 2nd Birthday Party.

I made this sign for the front door: 

And this for the gift table:

Guest Book and Party hats. The sign says "When I'm older I'll be curious who was here, please write a message in my book" and "Please put on a hat". I loved the image of George floating with balloons so I wanted lots of balloons in the decor. 

Cupcakes

I had my hubby pipe a blob of frosting on each (box mix) cupcake. I cut circles out of Wilton Sugar Sheets like I did for the Poke Ball cupcakes, used the scraps for the balloon-knot triangles and put them on the frosting blobs. I accidentally smeared white frosting on one and it looked like a shimmer on the  balloon so I added one to each of them. The ribbon was poked into the frosting after they were placed on the stand. After they were all in place, I gathered the ribbons for George's hand. 

I got the idea from Beth Kruse Custom Creations

Shortcakes 

Idea from Kitchen Fun With My Three Sons 

we served these with a bowl of sweetened strawberries and whipped cream.

Oreo truffles

Idea from Kitchen Fun With My Three Sons

On the bottom were banana muffins with cream cheese frosting and banana candies.

Savory {Monkey} Bread

Hundley Hot Dogs

Can I just say I love our hot dog roller, easy to serve, cook more after some have had theirs and great flavor! 

Jumpy Squirrels Mixed Nuts

Ice Cream Bar (pre-scooped the night before and stored in the freezer until time into paper cups from a restaurant supply store- best idea ever!) Had all the toppings for banana splits, but called them Banana Chops instead because we were using the bowls instead of boats. 

Buffet table, we just lined up crepe paper for a table runner. 

A variety of pudding flavors, Banana/vanilla, strawberry/vanilla, banana/strawberry, chocolate, chocolate/banana, ect. 

Quint's Fish Crackers (from the surprise birthday party episode)

Pisghetti's Rooftop Garden Veggies

Hand Picked Apple Slices

Renken's Bee Farm Honey and Peanut Butter Sandwiches

I didnt get a picture of the lemonade but we served "Steve's Lemonade" 

and "Barrel of Monkey Juices"

 Ellie in her Birthday Dress her Grammie Made her and a (Man in the) Yellow Hat (yellow hat + electrical tape)

#2 wreath I made out of cardboard, crepe paper and curled ribbon.

Table settings with Yellow Hat cups/plates (as seen in many places on the web). The centerpiece is bananas and red shredded paper with balloons on sticks.

Banner and Favors

The banner was made similarly to how I made the Strawberry Shortcake one but with poster letters and banana/monkey cut outs from Dollar Tree. The balloon cut-outs at either end were also from the Dollar Tree, it was my sisters idea to make it look like they were holding the banner up. 

I found these balloon cut-outs at Dollar tree but didnt know what to do with them. Last minute I got this idea because I had leftover letters from the banner. The CG logos were cut from a couple boxes of CG fruit snacks. At the top is a paper chain made from cheap event bracelets. 

The bags were for older children, the bowls were for the toddlers and baby. Inside were lollipops, raisins, animal crackers, bubbles, stickers and fruit snacks. The baby got some monkey and zebra socks from Dollar Tree and some crisp dried fruit.

Each family got a coloring book and crayons to take home. 

As I did last year, I played a slideshow of pictures of Ellie on our projection screen. I also downloaded a bunch of songs about bananas to play in the background with the Curious George movie soundtrack.  

Overall it was lots of great fun. 

Banana Invitation

I forget where I saw it first but I loved the peeling banana invitation idea.
Here is my version. I gave my banana a back peel, partly because I thought it would look complete and partly because the off-white card stock wasn't as sturdy as I thought, it was packaged with a piece of cardboard in the middle of the stack.
To tie it into the Curious George theme I made a produce sticker that says Curious? Peel me. I added a generic monkey or banana sticker to the back of the envelope.

How I did it:
Found a clip art banana shape (unpeeled).
Using Paint made it an outline.
Copied outline into Publisher and, using multiple text boxes, filled the top half of banana with details
Grouped the design and copied multiple times on a page, close together. (didn't worry about overlapping/losing the outline of the banana as long as the words were there.)
Printed as many pages as I needed.
Printed 3 banana outlines (in the same size!) on a sturdy card stock.
One outline was cut on the inside of the ink outline (cutting away the black outline) also cut stem off of this one (just eye-balled a rounded top)
Cut on the outside of the other 2, cutting the stem off of one.

Using the smaller stem-less banana, I traced (in pencil) the banana around the words anywhere that the outline had been cut off in publisher.
I cut out the paper bananas, just to the inside of the ink outline/trimming off just a bit of the ink/pencil marking.
The other, slightly larger, bananas were traced onto yellow felt using a brown marker. I traced an even amount of stemmed and stemless felt banana shapes.

Using the same brown marker I colored the stems of the stemmed ones, and added brown blotches (not on the on pictured) and drew the line (where the banana peel separates) down the entire banana of the stemless felt banana.
Next I ran the paper bananas through my xyron, words side up.
The sticker bananas were placed centered onto the stemmed felt banana.
Using the paper banana as a guide, I cut down the stemless felt banana, about half way, just to the bottom of the invite info.
I spread glue evenly onto the bottom, wordless, half of the paper banana, and stuck the cut felt banana to the paper banana, covering the paper banana.

For the stickers:
I found a good quality curious George logo and snipped (screen shot) the image of "Curious", copied in Paint.
Then, using Word, I made a yellow ? with a shadow and snipped/copied it to the Paint also
I had to edit the Curious part a bit so the ? would show up behind it.
(I couldn't match the font of "curious" perfectly so I thought it would work to put the ? Behind in a similar font/different color rather than try to add a ? to the end of the logo.
Under the curious? I put the words "peel me" in the same font as the ? (ms script bold I think). I added the oval around it all to mimic a Dole or Chiquita sticker.
I saved the sticker image to my computer.
Using Avery.com, I put the image onto mailing labels (2 ovals per mailing label, 3 will fit vertically but 2 horizontally gives some wiggle room)

(the image could be printed a bunch of times on paper then ran through the xyron or just glued but I have a small label obsession.)
Cut out the oval and stick to the banana skin.