Lillian's 2nd Birthday Party - Pink Ombré and Painting

I did quite a bit of crazy crafting for Lillian's birthday. So I'll just let you look at some photos and describe everything that warrants description under each of the photos. In the future I will document my late night crafting craziness while it is occurring but, since this blog is new and I wasn't prepared in advance, I obviously can't show you the "making of" photos...unless you have a time machine I can borrow. :)

My mom helped out by face painting anyone who was interested. It really made the party have a nice carnival feel.

I was so excited that everything was actually done before guests arrived and looked AH-MAY-ZHING. If I do say so myself. Last year for Lilly's 1st birthday I was not so successful. I had more than a few people icing cupcakes after they arrived and Lilly's cake looked like a mess. But it was perfect this year.

Guests were able to customize an apron with their name for all of their painting ventures. I provided letter stencils and paint markers. This allowed the adults to participate.

The menu was: mini mac and cheese bites, chocolate covered rice crispy treats, individual 7 layer dips and chips, cake (of course) and min fruit pizzas with peach-lemonade fruit punch. The only thing that I actually count as a failure was the punch. It tasted like a sweet-tart and just wasn't as delicious as I had hoped it would be. Also, the rice crispy treats were supposed to look like paint brushes dipped into paint but, they didn't really work out. However, they were still delicious.

Here you can see everything on the food table. My wonderful sister-in-law brought the flowers from the Cabbage Rose florist shop in Little Rock where she works and I created a "paint" spilling effect using a couple paint cans and a pink plastic table cloth. I'm sure you've seen it on pinterest.

The party had to be moved indoors due to rain but no one minded. Here you can see Lilly painting on her acrylic easel that I made with my Stepfather. In the background you can see our attempt at beautifying the garage with some Christmas trees covered in streamers. We also placed streamers on the ceiling and had plenty of balloons.

We had guests place presents in the reading room. My brother and husband placed the streamers.

Here I am with Lilly's perfect little cake. It was strawberry with whipped cream cheese icing. I attempted to make it ombré on the inside but it didn't work out too well. It was just REALLY pink. I created a pennant with bamboo skewers, ribbon and paint chips. I then wrote "Lillian" on each piece. I think it turned out pretty cute.

I took some leftover rope from the making of the acrylic easel and paired it with some clothes pins and duct tape to create a art dispay area. I seriously just took colorful, polka dotted duct tape and taped it on the wall but it actually looked really cute and was very functional.

Here is one of the party attendees with his cute apron and paintbrushes.

Here she is totally in the zone. One of the other activities I had was for parents to place their child's name on the canvas using stickers. Then the child was allowed to paint over them. When it is dry you can peel off the stickers and have the negative space of the stickers display their name through the paint. I have Lilly's on display and will post a photo of it later for you. The adults also enjoyed this and several went home with their own versions. They placed their last name and "est." with the year underneath. They turned out very nicely.

These were DELICIOUS! And soooooo easy to do. I baked the sugar cookies the night before using pre-made cookie dough. I also made the icing the night before. This way all I had to do was cut up some fruit and assemble them the day of. The icing was simply powdered sugar, vanilla and cream cheese.

I made this banner out of paint chips, ribbon and marker.

You can see the paint chip wreath I made on my mirrors above the couch and the balloon banner I made as well. I simply took a piece of cardboard and cut into a wreath shape. I then hot-glued the paint chips in an ombré order around the cardboard. For the balloons, I just threaded them all onto one piece of string through the tied off part of each balloon and hung them up.

Lilly enjoying her acrylic easel. You can also see her cute apron that I made with a lily on it.