Just Jen: February 2013

Jack has a few special friends that we made (ok, I made...) these cute necklaces for as Valentines. It's never to early to start training him that girls love to get jewelry on Valentine's Day...right?

Here's how to do it:

Paint wooden beads with acrylic craft paints and spray them with a clear acrylic sealer when dry.

Cut a 1.5" wide strip horizontally (so it will have some stretch) across the bottom of a white t-shirt. (You'll want to cut off the bottom hem of the tee first and then cut your strip. ) You'll end up with a big loop.

Cut into the loop so you end up with one long strip.

Center the first bead in the middle of the strip. Knot the fabric on each side to hold it in place.

Add the remaining beads to each side, knotting as you go.

Tie a simple double knot at the top to close it, and done!

Of course, we had to make one for little sister, too!

A few days ago, my little guy turned 4. I am still having trouble grasping that, but here we are anyway! This is the first year he had an opinion on his party theme, and he most definitely wanted an Iron Man party. Now, I LOVE planning the kids' parties and have dreaded the day when I would have to do a generic party based on a licensed character. I narrowly escaped that this year though since I was able to talk him into a general superhero theme with lots of heroes included. After all, we couldn't have Hulk and Thor and Captain America get their feelings hurt by being left out, right?

After looking around online, I found there was still a lot of room for creativity with this theme. Lots of fun, cute stuff. We have always had the kids' parties at home, but this year with all the friends he has made at school and church, the guest list had grown to the point that we couldn't accommodate all the kids+parents+family in our little space. And we certainly couldn’t count on the weather to be nice enough to have it outside, so we decided to have it at one of Jack's favorite places: Main Event. (He has even on occasion thanked Jesus in his bedtime prayers for this place. Such a sweet kid.)

My husband had a great idea for the invite, and I'm glad he talked me into it. He took all the pics for the invite and photoshopped them together, and I did the rest of the layout and finished off the tubes. These were ridiculously expensive to mail because of the odd shape, but luckily we were able to hand deliver most of them. They went over really well!

By having the party outside the house, I knew I was going to have to let go of my usual over-the-top decorations because of the limitations of the space we were going to be in. Instead I focused on the things I could control - the cake and the favors.

I had played with fondant once before for Andie's party with decent success and thought I was ready to graduate to something a little more involved. I found these adorable cupcake toppers online and decided to do my own version of them. I was really pleased with the way they came out, but I do think I can cross cake decorating off my list of back up careers… Fondant is HARD and I am officially in awe of anyone that can master it! Jack loved them, though (which is all I really cared about) and repeatedly told me what a great job I was doing. Once I even heard, "You are so wonderful for making those, Mommy." Totally worth all the effort just for that. I bought the cupcakes and icing (because I had long ago crossed baking off my list of back up careers) and plopped these on top. Done.

I had enough fondant and icing left to make Jack a special cake (blue, of course - his favorite color) with his own superhero logo.

For the favors, I thought it would be cute to make capes for the kids wear while they bowled and played games at the party. I found a couple of good t-shirt cape tutorials on Pinterest and decided that would be easy and cheap. It's not necessary to hem them, but I did turn the raw edges under with a zigzag stitch to give them a more finished look. I drew the symbols for each of the superheroes and printed them on the back of each cape like we do our personalized tees. The kids looked so cute!

I knew there would be balloons in the room, so I made masks and brought them to the party to tape on. Then I scattered a few comic book looking word burst graphics on the tables with some ribbon and called it done.

The party was a blast, and he had a great time, but we are definitely partied out. Well, almost…I may or may not already be gathering ideas for a sweet little girl's birthday coming up in August. :) I just can't help myself.