UNO Party...

I got the idea for an UNO party for the boys from an adorable UNO shirt found on the blog Made... you can check it out here. I suggested the idea to my husband and he thought it was a little odd I was mentioning an idea for the babies 1 year party when they were only about 6 months old. Anywho, the idea stayed with me and this is how we celebrated...

THE INVITES

Anyone who knows me knows I LOVE a good invite... it's the first impression of what your party is going to be and I like them to be special. To save time and money sometimes I do an electronic version, but I really do love and prefer a hands on, open an envelope and read, stick it on your fridge as a reminder, type invitation.

I found some UNO cards with the original look from my childhood on Ebay. I scanned them in on the computer and then made an invitation the same size as the card to put on the back. I had fun figuring out how to incorporate the different UNO card names in the invitation. After gluing the card and the invite together I had them laminated to give them the look and feel of a real UNO card.

Conveniently I already had these wonderfully cute little envelopes that I bought a while back at Envelope Mall.com. The cards fit perfectly in them. I started out using the vellum, green dot and red, but ended up using vellum for the majority of them. I thought they looked so fun with the number one showing through. My 7 and 4 year old helped me hand deliver a bunch and then I slipped the rest into a bigger envelopes to mail those we didn't catch and out of towners.

THE PARTY FAVORS

I searched online for Uno Cards and found some party favor sized. When I bought them I thought that the cards were the size of the box, but they were actually 1/2 the size of the box. I was a bit disappointed because I thought that they were actually big enough for someone to actually play. I guess technically you could play with them, but I think keeping track of them would be pretty hard!

The mini cards were the perfect size for necklaces so my daughter and I broke open a pack and made necklaces for people to wear while at the party.

We also did party favor bags for each family that included the Mini Uno Cards, Dum Dum Suckers, meltaway mints and (my favorite) Cinnamon Bears.

FREEZER PAPER STENCILED UNO SHIRTS

I've been meaning to try out freezer paper stenciling for a long time. A friend of mine has done some really cute shirts and I finally got around to giving it a try with the Uno shirts I made for the boys' birthday. You can find the tutorial here. It's the same great blog, Made, where I got the Uno idea to begin with! Freezer paper stenciling is super easy, cheap and really quite addicting... I'm already trying to figure out what I'll create next!

THE CAKE

I made Uno Card cakes for the party and then little Uno Card cakes for the babies, which ended up being smashed and tossed to the ground (see pic below, great shot Emily!)

I wanted the cakes to be relatively easy to make the night before the party so earlier in the week I made the cakes and froze them.

Also, earlier that week my friend Deanna showed me her fondant skills. She showed me how to make all of the "1"s out of fondant so they'd be ready to go when I iced the cake... this made icing the cake super easy. White icing layer, then marked the area I wanted to keep white with a pattern I had made, star tipped the rest of the top of the cake with the color of the card, piped a border, added the "1"s and there you have 'em... Uno Card cakes!

DINNER

Chicken Salad

croissants/rolls

carrots with ranch

string cheese

goldfish

strawberries with brown sugar sour cream dip

DRINKS

HAPPY UNO!

Bowling Birthday

After a year of changing ideas for her 7th birthday party my daughter finally settled on a Bowling Party...

I asked my dad to cut me out some little bowling pins that I could make into necklaces for party favors. My daughter and I painted them white, I drew lines on them with red marker and stuck on a sticker initial for each child. I then mod podged them to seal the sticker on and threaded them with red ribbon to make a necklace.

I also made sugar cookies to send home as a party favor. Each child got one of each cookie in a little bag. I also used the bowling pin cookies as a border on the bowling ball cake.

I used a flooding technique a friend told me about for the cookies. You pipe a border on each cookie and then flood it with a runnier icing. I piped all of the bowling pins, but had limited time (and was lazy) and didn't pipe the bowling ball guy or the balls... they would have looked much crisper if I had done that... maybe next time:) I iced the cake blue and then put lines of darker blue and white on the top of the cake. I mixed the colors as I spread the icing of the cake to make it look marbled. I used malt balls cut in half to look like the holes of a bowling ball.

Superman Birthday