It's Pahty Time! Whoo Hoo!

Let me start this post by saying if you don't have any interest in kids birthday parties then come back in a few days when I'm bound to post something about sewing. Or read ahead to hear about how I don't have any interest in them either.

Oh good, you're still here. Also, this is a long post so settle in and enjoy as I go into great detail on how I stress about the tiniest details when it comes to birthday party planning. 

Rocco has a Summer birthday and every year he gets the shaft. Finally this year he asked if we could hold a birthday party before school lets out so that all the friends he made this year can attend. I love planning a party but hate throwing a party. Especially with other people's children in attendance. I'm sorry, I like my kids, others not so much. Oh joy, this is looking like a lot of fun.

Since Rocco has his birthday in August I've been brainstorming since then. I kind of gave him license to pick a theme, but not really, because I don't do commercial themed parties (ie: Cars Movie, Thomas the Train, Oh my God Monster Trucks actually was proposed). So Retro Space it is! Good thing Rocco is obsessed with planets and knows an extraordinary amount of trivia related to outer space. 

Let me tell you the fantastic ideas that are out there in reference to this subject. If I had the party budget of Torie Spelling, hold on to your seatbelts, I would be a feature on Martha Stewart. (do any of you even get the reference to Torie Spelling? I watch a sh*tload of reality t.v.)

I'll just show you some photos of the highlights of my low budget party and at the end of this post I will list some of the great ideas I found/read about, but couldn't do because either I was on a budget or that I didn't want the other parents to give me that look. Oh ya, that look that says "Holy crap lady, he's seven years old for crissakes!" 

We held the party at a park for two reasons. 

1. Not at my house. No way, no how. Hello! You've seen what lives on my floors. That would mean I'd have to clean before the party and then clean again once they left. That would be twice in one week for cleaning and I didn't sign that contract thankyouverymuch (love you Chef!).

2. Rocco had to have a pinata. Most planned party venues don't want the mess.

 I found these fantastic invitations from letterspacepaper that come blank so you can run them through your printer at home. I've used invites from them before for two other birthday parties. I love the high quality card stock and they have quite a few great designs. I believe they will also print them for you if you prefer.

In the gift bags I gave glo sticks, "moon rocks", robot stickers, astronaut crayons, Dollar Store "comet balls" (that's what was actually printed on them) and the best part... a music compilation of some of our favorite children's music.

Oh how we love good kids music. When Rocco was little, before we knew he was blind, he was developmentally delayed and a super late talker. Listening to kids music would entrance him and you could tell he was concentrating on the stories being told through music. My particular favorite is Justin Roberts (he has a new album "Jungle Gym" being released 6/8/10 OMG I am so excited!) His style is I guess kind of folksy with great storytelling. I am not kidding I know the words to every song he's ever written. I'm telling you that means a lot because my own personal music taste is definitely nothing like this. I just lurve his lyrics and lovely storytelling. I think I'm going to drag the Chef and the kids to San Francisco to see him perform this summer. O.k. enough about him. Back to this darn party.

I used iron on transfer paper to make a t-shirt for me and Luca to wear. Rocco had this cute astrobot t-shirt already. I thought they were cute, but apparently most of the parents didn't get it because they all kind of looked at us weird. Do you get it?

We made a pretty cool cake...

 Got the idea online somewhere.

I found these adorable thank you cards at paper source. This is a great site for blank colored cardstock cards in various sizes. Love them!

 

Things we didn't do but I thought would be fun...

* Homemade tub of moonsand with tin foil balls as moon rocks

* Refrigerator box decorated as a rocketship

* Saturn ring toss

* Pin the spaceship on the planet

* If held indoors make one room dark with glow in the dark activities

* Astronaut costume and cardboard cutout background to take a photo of each child dressed  up and send as thank you's

* Seltzer rockets

And of course there is a cool place to get all things space related online. The Space Store.

The party turned out great. Glad it's over. Now I can start to stress about the next one.

Needless to say there are tons of great ideas to make a great astronaut/space party theme. I could go on for days and I won't. Yourwelcome.

Have any other great ideas to add to this theme? Just leave me a comment. Maybe one of my readers will use some of these ideas when planning their next birthday party.
...........................................................................................................................................................................

Valentine's At School

Today the kids celebrated Valentine's Day at school...

Don't you just love these homemade valentine's? Find the template at MADE. This was our first year making our own (I know, we have not been very good crafter's have we?)

I also made this cute Lil Blue Boo dress with peace signs, hearts and Hershey's Kisses (yum)

Pattern Love

Update: I covered my pattern weights finally!

Sewing! Sewing! Sewing! I'm in the mood to sew. Quite a while back I purchased the Village Frock pattern by Sugar City. As usual it sat among my many other patterns ready to be used pile. I've tried to make things a bit easier on myself by at least cutting out the pattern pieces when I buy it so that when I find the time/urge/desire etc... to finally start sewing it will be one step closer to actually happening. Don't remind me of all the Ottobre magazines I have with bookmarks upon bookmarks of patterns to one day trace. By then my kids will be in college and probably not so keen on cute rompers. I'm just guessing. 

So this adorable dress actually made it onto our Christmas cards this year. It turned out so stinkin' cute. The directions were easy to follow and I found it a rather quick sew (not counting the hand sewing, but that's what t.v. is for). 

I use extra large washers that I found at the hardware store as pattern weights. I also have some really big nuts (as in nuts and bolts) that I use. I actually want to cover them one day so they look cute on my sewing table when not in use.

I originally dyed some white linen (above) to a sweet pink for a dress (which is now cut and ready to sew for the past 4 months). The Christmas dress version I made out of a cotton fine wale corduroy in a very pale lavender. I pre-washed the fabric and it is super soft. The proper drape of fabric is key to making this dress turn out well. A stiff fabric will be too bulky and not have that vintage charm.

There is a lot of gathering for the neckline and sleeves so I think I may reduce this a bit when I make the dress again. Who am I kidding? Make this again? I have 1,000 other projects already lined up. Too bad the baby turned out to be a BOY! (I'm kidding ya know. Boys are fun to sew for. Kind of).  

So long story short. Easy peasy sewing instructions. I ran into no problems that I can recall. O.k. maybe the button loops where a little tricky, but they they turned out fine. Now that I'm actually writing about the dress I can't wait to make it in this drapey pink linen because I think it'll be even cuter than this one...

OMG! I so love this dress. Go make one. It's easy and oh so unique.

 

P.s. Here's that adorable (if I may say so) Christmas card that included the pretty little dress I made for Luca. Rocco and the baby are outfitted in boring store bought duds. Yawn.

Birthday Party Invitations

My little girl is turning six! I'm not usually a fan of the whole kids birthday party experience, but I LOVE making invitations and party favors. It means hours spent on the computer searching for just the right images, fonts and doo-dads. This years theme is based on papercrafts which is kind of funny because the party is at a gymnastics place. So the party event and theme don't exactly match. I was going to do a cute sock monkey tumble around theme until I found these...

I found this great note card set by Suzy Ultman called Paper Doll Parade from Pop Deluxe. They shipped it right quick and I am amazed at what you get for $14.95. I was originally going to hand write the invitations on the back of these note cards but then I realized I wasn't going to like it as much as printing them. Unfortunately the cards are cut outs and wouldn't feed through my printer so I switched tactics. I found images of artwork by Suzy Ultman here and OMG I love this web site. I want one of everything from each artist. Such amazing artists are shown here. So I copied some graphics and made this invitation...

How do you like the way I blocked out the phone number? I'm so computer savvy. 

I used the envelopes that came with the note cards. They are too cute. 

I'll post some of the papercraft ideas I came up with for party favors. There's quite a large community of papercrafters out there. I had no problem finding lots of inspiration. Wait till you see the great paper dolls I found.

Bibs

One of Rocco's favorite teachers moved back to Ohio to be closer to her family so I made her a little going away present for her 6 month old son. These bibs are super quick to make and have that homemade look that you don't mind giving as a gift.

Favorite Teacher nicknamed her little one Monkey and I had this cute sock monkey fabric in my stash so I made three bibs. I did a blog search for a pattern so I would have the right size, but you can just trace an already existing bib. I don't have any bibs from my older kids so I didn't know how big the neck opening is. I tried to find the website again but couldn't find the same one. I'm sure they are all pretty similar...it's just a bib.

My topstitching isn't too great on these, but I did play around with a zig-zag stitch which turned out pretty neat. I used a red thread for contrast. When I make these again I'll use a lighter weight liner. On these I used an extra thin waterproof mattress pad that I had. I'll probably use flannel next time. I'll also be making some of these with terry cloth for drool bibs when Vincenzo starts teething.

I also cut out a monkey from the fabric with my pinking shears and sewed it onto a card that I Brailled (my son Rocco is blind). This actually turned out cuter than the bibs.

 

Birth Announcement

Here's a look at our lovely birth announcement.

I purchased Envelopments pocket folds (5x7SP in tobacco) to use as my envelope to hold the announcement. On the inside pocket I slid a matte collage photo that I created at snapfish. All the photos were actually taken pretty quickly when Vinnie was about a week old. He slept through most of the pictures but I did manage to get one good photo with his eyes open. I also wanted to include brother and sister so I called them into our bedroom to take a few quick pics. I didn't feel like putting any cute clothes on them so I strategically placed my naked kids behind the basket that Vinnie was sleeping in. It was hard to find a place where the lighting was o.k. and the background not too cluttered. I took the pillows and blankets off of our bed and used the white walls as a simple background. The last photos I took where in the basket out in our garden. I just placed the basket in a nice green pile of tall grasses and hoped I got at least one cute shot. I had to work fast because the gnats were out there in full force. They didn't bother the baby, but they sure liked momma. I'm surprised I got a photo with all the twitching and swatting I was doing.

The photos turned out so much nicer than I imagined. I had originally planned on a black and white photo collage but decided that color would look nicer with the color of the announcement that I ordered from Tiny Prints. I love the way these turned out. It was fun to include all three kids in this announcement.