Girl Scout Journey Celebration

My daughter's Junior troop recently completed their Journey to earn their Get Moving badge.  They spent the last year diligently working on it, learning about energy and conservation along the way.  The Journey concluded with an event at a local park to celebrate their accomplishment.  Because I love parties, I volunteered to assist the mom leading the event.  She was gracious enough to let me be her collaborator on the project.  It was so much fun to share this project with her - thanks, T.!  We are kindred party-planning spirits!

To honor the journey, we stuck with an earth and conservation theme and worked to bring in lots of color as well as upcycled and reclaimed elements with some pretty vintage touches as the cherry on top and is that a run-on sentence or what?

Food
Dirt cups:  Chocolate pudding and crumbs with whipped cream, enclosed in mason jars - the ultimate eco-friendly party tool.  T. gussied them up with cupcake wrappers on the lids for a punch of color.  She stacked them in a beautiful dark wood crate, which I totally covet!

Earth cupcakes:  Modified from this post (skipped the heart center), these were a hit.  Topped with a simple buttercream, they were quick, easy, and festive.  Side note - when I tinted the batter, I wasn't thinking and did more green than blue and it irritated me all day that my ratio of "land" to "water" was skewed.  Did I mention that I'm a geek?  Anyhoo, regarding the frosting - I did hear from some girls that the frosting was a bit too sweet.  Does anyone have a buttercream recipe that's less sweet?  Mine is 2 sticks butter, 4 cups powdered sugar (which I reduced to 3 cups), and a splash of milk and a bit of vanilla.  My favorite frosting is the cooked frosting recipe listed here - it is TO DIE FOR, but I was worried it wouldn't hold up in the heat - even the buttercream got a little flat and melty and buttercream is MUCH stiffer than this cooked frosting.  (And in case I wasn't clear - this frosting = AMAZING.)  But if you make it, do yourself a favor and do not use store-brand butter.  Name-brand butter only.  You may also want to do a practice run before trying to make it for an event.  There are some traps that can make things go very wrong.

Fruit Skewers:  T. and I split them up and each made half.  I really liked that approach because we ended up picking different fruits, which made for a nice variety in terms of taste and color.

Decor
The food table was covered in a blue cloth (originally, it was covered by T.'s creamy vintage lace tablecloth, but the high winds knocked over a pitcher of lilacs that some idiot put on the table (moi!), so we had to improvise.  Food was arranged around the aforementioned crate (me want!) and accented with some pretty pansies and a sweet little doily.  In lieu of water bottles, T. brought a beverage dispenser filled with cool water.  We supplied plastic cups which were cobbled together remnants from other parties.  We also made sure to bring recycling bins to the park.  The paper straws added a nice pop of color.  The final touch was a simple banner that T. put together with twine and vintage napkins - the napkins were draped over the twine and pinned in place.  Even in teh high winds, it held together nicely.  The vintage napkin banner was just the right little touch to bring some vintage elegance to the setting.

The girls sat picnic-style on blankets spread under trees to enjoy their treats.  The idea was to have jugs and jars of lilacs scattered around, but it was just too windy.  The lilacs were grouped in a pretty basket and used to accent the food table instead.

 Activity
In keeping with their focus on recycling, the girls made jewelry from reclaimed hardware.  We have a Tool Thrift Shop in town where donated items are resold at low prices.  All proceeds go to a local senior living facility.  I was able to find a ton of washers in various sizes.  A quick coat of primer and they were ready to be enameled with nail polish.  I found several sets of mini bottles at Big Lots and Marshall's and the girls went to town making unique pieces.  We provided hemp twine in bright colors to string the finished product.

Awards
The event concluded with the leaders talking with the girls about the highlights of the Journey followed by passing out their patches.  For a fun presentation, the patches and a seed packet with a vintage-inspired label were bundled into a colorful bandanna hobo pouch tied with jute twine.  Because the whole troop earned the same patch, there was no need to personalize the bandanna pouches.  In retrospect, we should have considered handing them out rather than letting the girls pick their own.  I noticed that while the leader was speaking, some of the girls were more focused on creeping closer to the bandannas to ensure that they could be the 1st to pick their color.  Oops!

Paris Party - Art, Fashion, and Cuisine

For my daughter's 9th birthday, we came up with a Paris in Pearls theme because we love all things French and pearls are her favorite.  We decided to focus on fashion, art, and cuisine to reflect the theme.

For Fashion, we created a beret-bar.  I made berets out of fleece (no hemming required and unlike felt, it stretches so fit was easy) for each attendee.  I used a tutorial for a Super Mario hat, but just omitted the brim.  I can't find the tutorial now, but I will try to recreate it in a later post if I can.  I deliberately made them all in ivory so there would be no fighting over colors.  I also made a bajillon pins using pin backing from the craft store (use a coupon!) and  fabric rosettes, beads, pearls, rhinestones, silk flowers, whatever I could find that was cheap and fit the vintage-y color scheme. 

The girls could decorate their berets by selecting items from the beret-bar.  We also provided lots of long pearl necklaces and I made a ton of bracelets using stretch magic and stringing beads and pearls.  I threw a few silk flowers glued to ribbons in there as well.  After adorning themselves, the girls could don sunglasses and pose with French thought bubbles in our makeshift photobooth.

Art was the biggest part of the day.  I really wanted the girls to be able to paint, but knew that I didn't have the table space for all of them and couldn't possibly afford 12 easels.  My solution?  I took to the trees!  I tossed a heavy roll of florist ribbon over a branch, cut off the roll, and stapled both ribbon ends to the back of the canvas.  I then repeated this process to suspend a canvas for every girl. 

Covered with a thrift store lace tablecloth, the picnic table made a great area to hold long paint brushes (bought in assorted packs with a coupon at Joann's) in galvanized tin buckets from the thrift store, repurposed mason jars filled with water, a crate of acrylic paints, and little painting palettes bought on clearance at Michael's.  Those were a huge hit. 

My suspended canvases worked out so well and I loved how it served as activity, favor, and decor in one.  One of the mothers gasped when she saw it and said "It's so magical!"  That was one of my proudest party moments!  Bonus - the paintings dried so quickly as they swayed in the breeze.  AND we were able to just snip the ribbons and send them home with short lengths still attached so that the girls could use the ribbons to hang them at home. 

Cuisine was easy - we served brie and Camembert, mini croissants and quiches from BJ's, chocolate mousse, and they sampled Orangina (big hit) and Perrier (big loser).  We also had fruits and veggies and everything had a label with the food item in French and English.  I had also made French-English phrases sheets with phonetic pronunciations - which I forgot to pass out - oops, so I included them in the thank you notes.  We made French cookies (madeleines) and passed those out as favors for departing guests.  And the cake was my very easy and very beautiful Rose Cake, with edible pearls of course -see post here:  Cake Fails and Triumphs 

Thrift Store Tea Party

This was a tea party that I threw for my daughter’s 5th birthday party.  As with most things I do, my mother helped immensely with the planning and decor – thanks, Mom!  We heavily utilized thrift store finds with this party to keep costs down and impact high.

We really wanted the little girls to feel grown up, so we scoured thrift stores for real china cups, saucers, and teapots.  Some of the cups got broken in transit from mom’s house to mine, so I super glued them back together and turned them into little vases for the centerpieces on the tea tables.  Filled with colorful silk flowers, you couldn’t tell that they had ever been broken.  And they were just the right size to not overwhelm the tiny tables.

Table covers were thrift store lace curtain panels over thrift store sheets.  We gathered and swagged them to make it easier for the girls to get in and out of the tables.  I found some lovely embroidered fabric napkins (which I have used several times since for nice dinners and other parties) that we rolled up and tied with ribbon to add some extra fancy to the tables.

In lieu of tea, each teapot was filled with pink lemonade.  The girls enjoyed serving themselves and having a separate teapot on each table was a big hit and very practical - I didn't have to go around refilling 12 tiny cups!  It felt a little excessive at the time to invest in china for a one-time event, but I have to say that I’ve been surprised at how much additional use they’ve gotten over the years.  I’ve enjoyed them for holidays, special dinners, and a shabby chic bridal shower for a coworker.  I also have plans to use them for a Girl Scout event to earn the manners and etiquette badge.  Not to mention that I’ve offered them out to friends and family for THEIR little ones to have a tea party. 

For food, we made finger sandwiches cut into fun shapes with sturdy metal cookie cutters, petit fours made from frozen pound cake squares glazed and topped with purchased sugar flowers, and cupcakes topped with marshmallow flowers.  The marshmallow flowers were so easy and so high-impact.  Just cut marshmallows in quarters, pinch and pull the ends of the pieces to reshape into petals, and arrange around a candy center (jellybeans here) to form a flower on top of a frosted cupcake.  You could also dip the cut side in colored sugar if you want AND you can even make your own colored sugar for very little money and trouble.  Pour some sugar into a snack-size Ziploc bag, dab in some gel food coloring (I’ve never tried anything but gel), zip the bag and squeeze the sugar to mix in the color.  Adjust with more color if needed.  Voila - free sanding sugar.

I tried to include my son in the festivities as well.  He looked quite handsome in his top hat and vest.  Vest from the thrift store, top hat from Oriental Trading company.  The hats came in a pack of 12, so I offered the rest to a friend for her daughter's magic party.  She cleverly used top hats as receptacles for chips and other snacks.

For games, my mother found a carriage-shaped plastic teapot at a thrift store and painted it in party colors.  It was the perfect receptacle for a game of Toss the Teabag.  I made the large teabags by filling organza favor bags with dried kidney beans and stapling them closed with a ribbon and tag – the tags were personalized with the guest’s names.  We also played musical chairs and Pass the Teapot.  To eliminate hurt feelings, when the girls were tagged “out” in games, that was their turn to pick some fancy jewelry or to select their favor bags.  I highly recommend that if you want a no-crying-kids-zone at your parties.  Favors were Dollar Store purses stuffed with candy necklaces and rings.

We also had a teapot pull-string pinata – one of my best Oriental Trading finds ever – and stations where the girls could make their own fancy necklaces using pony beads and boondoggle (or gimp depending on what part of the country you hail from).  I wanted to have the girls decorate their own hats, but we just couldn’t come up with a safe and effective adhesive that they could use (glue gun burns / toxic fumes and 5 year olds don’t mix).  My mom ended up decorating thrift and Dollar Store hats in advance and the girls were able to pick their favorite.  Worked out fine and no medical emergencies - yay!

We had also spent several months stocking up on fun jewelry, fancy gloves, and thrift store dresses.  The girls loved getting all dressed up.  And I have to say that lilac bushes in bloom are the absolute best backdrop ever.  This was at our old house and boy, do I ever miss those bushes.  They always bloomed for my daughter’s birthday.  It was like magic.

I wish that I had a close-up picture of the hat garland my mother made.  She found a bag of doll-sized straw hats at a thrift store, decorated them with ribbons and flowers, mounted them on a long ribbon, and used that to adorn the archway into the yard.  I love them so much.  I save them and put them out with my Easter decorations every year.

This sort of thing is my favorite part of party planning - finding something ho-hum or unexpected and turning it into something that's just-right.

Shabby Chic Pink and Green Baby Shower Candy Buffet

I describe myself as an all-purpose craft geek and I really do like to dabble in a little bit of everything.  In addition to "traditional" crafting where you have a final product that you've made and can now maybe wear or decorate with, I enjoy applying my creative energies to parties as well.  Over the next few posts, I'll highlight some of the parties that I've done over the years for my loved ones.  I think I'll start with this baby shower for my best friend.  I wasn't able to be as involved in the planning as I would have liked, since I live 300 miles away from my BFF - sniffle, sniffle, but I was tasked with sourcing and assembling the candy buffet.  And it was super fun.  And expensive.  But mostly fun.

BFF wanted a shabby-chic shower with soft pinks and greens, so I immediately set out to find candies in those shades.  Pink was easy.  Green was... less easy.  I ended up finding candy in all sorts of places - from Target to Walmart to Ollies (which is a rough-and-tumble discount store) to the Dollar Tree to local amazing grocery store Wegmans.  My biggest challenge, other than finding green candy, was balancing the need for large amounts of candy to make a nice, full display, with balancing the budget.  Candy buffets can get real expensive real quick.  Here were some of my strategies to keep costs down and impact up.

Don't limit yourself to just candy:  I wanted lots of height on my table and one of the 1st purchases was a 2-ft tall vase on clearance at A.C. Moore.  Once I realized how many M&M's it would take to fill that vase, however, I was a little discouraged.  But then I found pink marshmallows at Walmart - score!  At $1 a bag, they were a steal and it only took me about 6 bags to fill the vase.  Big impact, lots of height, little $$.  And they were a very popular item with the kids attending the shower.  I also filled in on the cheap with cookies.  Pink wafer cookies and pink and white frosted animal crackers gave big bang for the buck.  Don't hesitate to venture beyond the candy aisle.

Get off your high horse:  I'll admit it - I'm kind of snooty about eating food from the Dollar Store.  I just don't like to do it.  But I will say that I had some of my best finds there.  Pretty green butter mints and marshmallow twists in soft pink and green.  They looked great, tasted good, and didn't break the bank.  Don't be afraid to go outside your comfort zone a little bit.

Keep an eye out everywhere you go:  So I went to the Dollar Store looking for containers and scoops and ended up finding some of my prettiest and most unexpected candies.  This was  a great lesson for me and thereafter, I made it a point to look for candy at every store I entered.

 It's OK if everyone doesn't get one of everything:  This was hard for me - my inner 2-year-old wanted everything to be fair and so that meant that all 70 guests should get to have a big swirly lollipop if they wanted one.  But guess what?  This is not economically sound.  Buy a handful of the big-ticket items, assemble the buffet, and wash your hands of it.  Only 3 people get a lollipop.  So what.

Don't be snobby about your choices:  I really like chocolate and I really couldn't care less about any other kind of candy.  But this buffet isn't about me and just because I don't like lollipops doesn't mean that they shouldn't make an appearance.  So don't let your preferences hold you back!  I had plenty of chocolate, but  I also had dum-dums, jolly ranchers, and watermelon sours and they were all eaten.  Your pass-up is someone else's favorite, I guarantee it.

 It's OK if another color slips in there:  I was kind of obsessed with only having pink and green, but for certain candies, other colors came as part of the deal.  The pink and green non-pareils also had yellow in the mix.  Did I want to handle them and pull out all the yellow ones - um, I kind of did want to, but I stopped myself because Ewww!  That would be gross and obsessive, so I refrained.  And you know what?  I think  the display was prettier with a little yellow mixed in.  Ditto with the swirly lollipops.  The closest I could get was pink, green, and lavender - and it totally worked.  I DID however sequester all the blue Hershey Kisses.  And I DID eat them all on the sly.  All in the name of color-coordination of course.

It's OK if you can't afford to make it perfect:  I know that there are some amazing, perfect parties out there.  That's not really what I do.  I live in the real world and have a budget, which means that I have finite resources.  This means that I have to make trade-offs.  I tend to err on the side of taste, as in it has to taste good.  So that means that more money goes to the food and there's less left over for containers and table coverings.  To that end, I had to compromise and use things that I all ready had, like glass casserole dishes, or things that were cheap, like plastic tablecloths.  I couldn't afford linens long enough to reach the floor, so I used dollar store plastic tablecloths on the bottom and put a short length of clearance fabric over the top.  Had I covered the whole table in fabric, I would have spent $20.  Using my low-brow method, It cost me $5.  And it did the job.  So don't beat yourself up because your stuff isn't perfect.  I don't think that most people are thinking, "Ugh, is that a plastic tablecloth?"  They are most likely thinking, "CANDY" and are focused on trying to get to the swirly lollipops before they are gone.

It came together really well and was a lot of fun to work on.  I look forward to doing another one some day!

And some bonus pics for you - I can't take credit for this part, but the other girls working on the shower had the idea to decorate the ceiling with individually hand-decorated Chinese paper umbrellas.  It was so pretty and creative.  Kudos, G., A., S., and L.!