Ellie's Football Birthday Party!

I was pleased when my turning-5 year old chose a Football party theme. Her birthday falls shortly after Superbowl, so I wouldnt have to change the decorations, and since we host every year, we had a lot of decorations already.

Plus the food is easy! Concession food, like hot dogs and nachos:


 Gatoraid to drink:

these were going to go in the goodie bags, but ended up not fitting (we did have red, which was the favorite color)


using the big orange drink cooler was fitting for a football party, and easy! My in-laws got this small football shaped cooler at a garage sale awhile back, which worked well for water bottles.

For a "guest book" Ellie wrote a request, and I got this football shaped/textured paper from the scrapbook section of the craft warehouse.

Some of the decorations:


The goodie bags were brown paper sacks that Ellie turned into footballs with strips of paper and glue:

inside the goodie bags were some foam footballs, referree whistles, cracker jacks (Ellie's only experience with sport game food she requested) and football candies. The babies got goodie bags with football socks and squeeze apple sauce.



For activities, we had football shape-themed sugar cookies for the kids to decorate their own megaphones, jerseys, footballs and helmets.


We also had a beading activity (Ellies request) and sport themed beads.

The birthday girl's outfit:

Headband is from etsy, "jersey" is from Zazzle and the pants are part of a pajama set I got on sale at Kmart. He referree whistle was from the goodie bags. Purple hair courtesy of Ellie's aunt.



Cake by Pink Princess Cakes 


Ellie helped make football shaped chocolate cookies, which was a chocolate cookie mix dough spread out and cut with a cookie cutter, then baked and threads piped on in candy melts.




My headband from my sister's Etsy shop
More pictures of the decorations

For table runners I reused the astroturf "grass" i bought for Penny's Bug birthday as table runners and added football themed Easter eggs and small finger football toys that I found at the dollar tree.

Carousel Party!

A carousel birthday for my yee-haw loving 2 year old!

She always remembers horses and has to say good-bye to them when we see them (or even the benches painted like horses at the library!

I contemplated doing a wild horse theme or even a cowgirl theme, but since we had decided her birthday would be at a restaurant instead of at home, I decided the Carousel theme would be great, because we can go to the carousel for rides after!

I have been procrastinating getting this blog post up, so I am just going to post pictures with captions and call it good!

Party Favor bags from Oriental Trading co


I made this favor with a small plush pony, candy stick and cardstock

I was so proud of this cake! My first time working with fondant (store bought) The cake is on a lazy susan so it really spun! I borrowed the wilton carousel kit from a friend, and used candy melts to decorate the horses
The cake stand is a cupcake tree, but instead of using the supports, I covered 2 popcorn tins with striped paper (the back was red polka dots), added ovals cut from a gold gift bag (both were leftover from the Super Mario Party. I used spiral paper straws as posts/added support. Some of the cupcake toppers were chocolate, some were edible paper, and some were animal cookies glued to pretzel sticks with melted chocolate.


I ordered Penny's shirt from Zazzle and it turned out faded (as pictured) but they sent me a replacement which looked MUCH better, (but I failed to check the mail before we left for the party and thought it did not arrive on time, so she wore the faded one).

For table decorations, I found these circus tent goodie boxes on clearance at Oriental Trading Co, they were deeply discounted because the sticky areas used to assemble them weren't any good, I knew I could fix them as I turned it into a tiny 1 horse carousel!

to glue to paper straws, I cut notches in the tip of the straw to fold over for more glue-able surface area

for the top of the horse, I found it worked better to fold some of the tabs in

I cant believe I did not get a good finished picture of these! The prototype was a small candy dish, but then I opted just to make them center pieces. Each kid that wanted one took one home. I have a few leftovers in the attic, perhaps I will add a picture later. 

The pizza restaurant we went to has this and another ride-on toy, I think this alone would have made her birthday fun!



After lunch and playing at the pizza restaurant's arcade some of the guests went to the carousel for rides and popcorn.

The birthday girl wore her horsey boots, skirt made by my mom, and shirt from Zazzle.

Someone had a long tough day!