Saturday, August 25, 2012

Royal Birthday Bash


One day out of the blue, my son decided that he was a king. Naturally, this meant that his baby sister was the queen, my husband became "Prince Daddy", and I was granted the title of "Princess Mommy".  We live in "the blue castle". His flip flops became his official "king shoes". The list goes on and on.

The Royal Family
Because their birthdays are only 5 days apart, I decided to throw a double birthday party for my little  king and queen. Here is how I threw a "Kimperfect" (a.k.a. cute & on a budget) birthday party for 13 kids and 18 adults.

Invitations
Decorations
Cupcakes
Favors/Activities
Kimperfect Notes

Invitations: 

I usually love sending out cute, printed invitations because you'll have something to stick in the scrapbook. I fought this instinct and went with an evite. I chose the princess crown template & here is how I worded the invitation:


Hear ye, hear ye! 

The honor of your presence is requested at the royal birthday festivities for King Jacob V and Queen Emily II.
Join us as we slay a dragon, rescue the King's treasure, and partake in a royal feast.  Your little ladies are welcome to wear their favorite princess dresses. Armor will be provided for the knights.

Decorations:
I looked for a very long time for some high quality royal birthday decorations. Most princess stuff, unless you're going with a true Disney theme, is really tacky. The knight stuff is also pretty lame. I really didn't feel like making everything like I did last year, so I was willing to pay a little more for the convenience factor. 

Then I hit the jack-pot: Meri Meri. She had two themes that went very well together: "Calling All Princesses" and "Brave Knights". After a lot of comparison shopping, I found that the best deal was the direct Meri Meri website and I bought (for each theme): garlands, small cake plates, cupcake kits, party hats, and the princess castle centerpiece. This got a little pricey, but I found a coupon code for 25% my order on www.retailmenot.com . I think with shipping, it was $75. Yikes! But remember, I was buying for two kids. 

Garlands: 
I used my Circuit machine to add their names and ages to the banners. Emily's was easy- I just glued the letters or numbers to the garland. Jacob's garland was very nice, but I had to cut card stock backings for the letters (which I double matted). I added balloons to cover the spot where I used a nail to hang the banners in the corners of my dining room.

The full view of the banners. 

Emily's banner

Jacob's banner

Cupcakes:

I love to make extravagant cakes for people. But the more I looked into creating a giant castle cake, the more I began dreading it. Wilton sells a castle cake kit that looks great, but got very poor reviews. So I decided to go the "easy route" and make cupcakes. Hahaha. Easy. 

My original plan was to get a Publix sheet cake and put the castle on top of it, surrounded by the cupcakes made from the cupcake kits (they have princesses and knight toppers). But the more I played around with it, the more I realized that I needed cupcake towers. 


Wilton makes cardboard toppers for $5.99 that you can decorate. 
For both towers, I used scrapbook paper to cover the tiers & ribbon to cover the edges. I set the castle on a cake plate to give it some height and covered it in pink fabric ($2 from Walmart). 
I found 2 amazing recipes on Pinterest for the cupcakes. The knight cupcakes are Andes Mint cupcakes and the Princess cupcakes are white wedding cake cupcakes with vanilla butter cream frosting. These were totally from scratch cupcakes, so the cost of making them was fairly high. I didn't realize it was going to cost so much, but I probably spent at least $50 in ingredients. I made all of the cupcakes the week of the party and once they had cooled, I frosted them and froze them until the party. 

I also gave out extra cupcakes as favors. To package them, I used tongs to put the frozen (so that the icing doesn't smear) cupcakes into little plastic cups (dollar store!). Then you open up a cellophane bag and roll it down (like you're rolling the sleeves on a sweater) before dropping the cup into the bag. Finish it off by tying it with a ribbon and (if you had more time than I did) a "thank you for coming" tag. 

Favors/Activities:



The girls decorated magic mirrors. I bought pink double-sided stand mirrors from the dollar store. I cut out card stock circles ahead of time to hot glue to one side of the mirrors after they were decorated with markers, crayons, glitter, foam stickers, and princess stickers. 

If I could do it again, I probably would have decorated a hand mirror, but these were cute, too. I wanted a craft that wouldn't be thrown away or destroyed as quickly as a foam crown or something.


Each of the boys decorated a knight's shield. I made 8 shields for less than $15- that is better than Oriental Trading. They were easy to make!  I just cut out shields from foam boards from the dollar store, painted them with silver paint ($0.50 at Michael's), rolled the sides in white glue and glitter.

To decorate, I bought knight stickers and red duct tape (to make a cross). And I used a small piece of velco on the back as a handle. (I'll post a separate tutorial soon.)













   Slaying the dragon (pinata) was King Jacob's favorite part of the party.  This pinata was ridiculously hard to break! Prince Daddy ended up smashing it. 

It was also kind of girly looking. To make it look more fierce, I added some tissue paper flames. 


Inevitable jousting matches. I bought the foam swords at the Dollar Store and Michael's.







I bought a Discovery Kids cardboard castle at Burlington Coat Factory. The kids had a get time playing in a "real" castle. It had towers, a drawbridge door, etc... Totally worth $15.00. 














Kimperfect notes:

* For the menu, we served salad, a veggie tray, chips and salsa, hummus, Chick-Fil-A nuggets, Pepperidge Farm Chessman cookies (which looked really cute with the theme), and Bugles. I ran out of time & motivation to add cute signs to the food. If I could do it over again, I would have called the bugles "Dragon Toenails", the nuggets "King Jacob's golden nuggets", "non-poisoned" apple juice, etc...
* I bought several yards of red, blue, and gold costume satin fabric at Walmart for the table cloths. Instead of confetti, I used craft jewels.
* I wanted to try this ice cream idea from Pinterest and even bought fleur de lis and princess cookie cutters, but again, I ran out of time. Someone will have to try this and tell me how well it turns out.  

Happy party planning! 

1 comment:

  1. Do you still have the decorations from your party? Are you willing to sell them? Let me know. Thanks

    ReplyDelete