Ice Cream Shoppe Birthday Party

  I had a ridiculous amount of fun putting Booper's birthday party together this year!

  I let Booper pick the party theme by browsing the party sections of Girl, Inspired and Craftiness is Not Optional, and she loved the  adorable ice cream shoppe party that Jess threw best, so I did my best to imitate that. I was also inspired by this ice cream fabric (which I used in Booper's gift) and imitated one of the ice cream cones from the fabric to use in the printables.

  I started by drawing up some invitations in Illustrator:

  I made envelopes to match... my printer really didn't want to cooperate for most of the things I printed and left black smudges on some things, but I did get it all printed!

  I broke out the paper-mache and made an ice-cream-cone-shaped pinata... I started with a cone made from poster board, a balloon, and wads of paper, then covered it all in 2 layers of paper-mache. I gently sanded it to get rid of the worst lumps, painted it with acrylic paints and hot-glued a red pom-pom on top.

  Then I cut a flap in the bottom, and a bunch of little slits. I added candy and ribbons in the slits with only one being knotted, then taped it shut. I added too much tape though... it was trying to fall open when I first taped it, but by the party time the 'winning' ribbon didn't open the flap, so I had to un-tape it to get the candy to fall out! I also should have used much smaller candies, as a lot of the pieces got stuck and had to be helped along.

  Since the party was indoors, and most of the guests were pretty young, I thought this was a better alternative to a traditional pinata! I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, although I have no idea what to do with it now that the party is over!

  For another fun thing for the kids, I painted a sundae on another sheet of poster board so we could play 'Pin the Cherry on the Sundae'. It took a while! And my husband thought I was crazy for hand-painting something for kids to stick stickers on... but I've been wanting to practice painting lately and thought this was a good thing to do it on!

  I drew a cherry in Illustrator, printed a bunch of them out on sticker paper, and used the Pix-scan mat in my Silhouette to cut them. I didn't calibrate my camera with it first (this is the first time I've used that mat) so it isn't quite a perfect cut, but still pretty impressive! The photo above is the only one with one of those cherries in it though. Here's a detail shot of the painting... I definitely feel like I have a better idea of how to handle the brush after painting this:

  I also designed some little coloring books in Illustrator, and set them in a stack with a bunch of crayons:

  There's a regular cone, a sundae bowl,

 a soft-serve cone, and a milkshake in them:

  I was playing around with these designs in Illustrator to see what they might look like colored in, and I loved the results so much that I printed each off letter sized, matted them with painted poster board, and hung them on my wall for the party:

  The colors are a little bit more accurate in this photo:

  I made favor bags for all of the kiddos by printing on white paper bags... the only way I could get these to print was by tricking my printer. I'd set it to print as letter sized, take out all of the paper, then hit 'print'. And then, once it told me I was out of paper, I would put a bag in and print that! 

  The bags included starburst, a super-ball, an 'ice cream shooter' toy, a dimensional ice cream sticker (not actually meant for kids, but seriously adorable and matched the party too well not to include) and bubbles in an ice cream container. The favors are all from Amazon.

  I also found these cute ice-cream cups at Hobby Lobby, and wrapped them up as prizes for whoever won the 'Pin the Cherry' game. Two cups, because I didn't know whether a boy or girl would win and my nephews don't like pink! But of course I didn't get a photo of the green one.

  I finally figured out how to make a helium tank work (turns out it says it in actual words on the side of the tank, not just the pictures that are on the outside of the box) so I put up a few helium balloons in some corners:

  For the food table, I hung eyelet fabric and ruffle fabric (I'd have preferred to just use the ruffle fabric, but the piece I had was too small and didn't look right by itself) and added a banner:

  I taped some non-helium balloons to cones made of shipping paper and added a pom-pom on top- these didn't turn out as adorable as I thought they would but they still worked! I tried helium balloons first but the weight of the cone was too much for them to stay afloat.

  Here's the entire food table:

  I made the cake with strawberry cake mix, which is unfairly delicious but definitely didn't do me any favors when it came time to frost it, because it was very delicate and fell apart easily. 

  Still cute though!

  I made iced tea, raspberry-flavored saltwater taffy, and punch (although I didn't make the punch until the guests arrived, so it's not in these photos) and wrapped water bottles with some striped paper.

  We had Kettle chips and snack trays and strawberry-maple chex mix:

  I set out bowls and two kinds of cones (although apparently I swapped the tags for the sugar and cake cones!) I also made strawberry-flavored saltwater taffy.

  I was planning on making the syrups but decided the night before the party that I should just buy them and transfer them to other bottles!

  I also set out rainbow sprinkles, chopped peanuts, and maraschino cherries:

  And finally, I made some ice cream. It was, without question, the best ice cream I've ever made! Possibly even the best I've ever eaten. Three flavors, vanilla, strawberry and chocolate.

  I printed tags for all of the foods but they were mostly ignored... I'd do it again anyway, because I think they really helped everything to look cohesive.

  And those blurry signs in the front say 'Pick a vessel, Scoop a flavor, Serve some sauce, and Add some garnish'. ;-)

  All in all, I'm super happy with how this all turned out! It was a lot of work, but mostly a lot of fun! I made an outfit and a gift for Booper too, so I'll be back before too long with the details on those. =)

Thanks for stopping by,