Kaia's 4th Birthday

Oh, my, I've had a little blog break. For some reason I really didn't want to do this post, and at the same time felt like I needed to do it before moving on. I think, in large part, it was all the stress and craziness leading up to her party, and I was still too exhausted to want to even look through the pictures. Why was it stressful and crazy getting ready for her party? Because it always is, no matter how much I try to prepare in advance. 

Anyway, getting on with things. Since Kaia's theme choice was a bit.. well.. not very concise, (she wanted fairies, unicorns, dragons, castles, rainbows, and mushrooms!) I tried to do her decorations mostly based around a rainbow theme. I bought a big bag of multicoloured balloons, and after they were blown up I tied them together in bunches of colour to make the "balloon rainbow" she had requested. We hung it up on the living room wall, and I think it came out very pretty!

I did find rainbow streamers ahead of time, while we were picking things out and price comparing, but, (oops!) I totally forgot to pick them up. Instead, we used purple and green streamers we had on hand, and she got a big bunch of helium balloons, including all the colours of the rainbow, and some special birthday bubble balloons.

Her one big birthday request was to have the basement (our play space,) finally painted for her party. That soaked up a whole lot of our prep time, and added greatly to the stress and craziness, as she didn't make this ever-so-important-to-her request until about two weeks before her party. We did get it mostly finished in green, teal, and purple, using the absolutely fantastic, no-VOC, Yolo paints that we bought over a year ago for the basement from our wonderful local Michigan supplier. I am so happy it is finally painted, and it is lovely! We have yet to finish all the trim, (which will be cream,) cabinets, and doors, but having the walls slathered in beautiful colour was quite enough for her. I will have to get pictures when we complete it.

To decorate the play space walls I painted a great big unicorn, (styled after The Last Unicorn, with some Kaia-requested alternations,) cut grasses and bushes out of green paperboard, (Kaia then glued plastic "gems" to all the bushes,) and we made construction paper mushrooms, (which the girls really enjoyed adding the spots to!) I wanted also to make a big dragon, and turn one of the doorways downstairs into a castle entrance, but I ran out of time. (sad face) I stuck all the decorations up for the below picture, but this was before we painted, and for the party I spread them around the room.

I looked up a number of rainbow themed party ideas, and good grief! What a lot of sugar was involved in all those table settings! I'm not against giving out some candy at my kids' parties, don't get me wrong. To be honest, though, to lay out the kind of sweets-laden table that I found pictures of all over the web at a child's party, you would have to be insane! They certainly look pretty, but I can only imagine what kind of candy-frenzied berserker-child madness must ensue once you have unleashed the children on it! I went with a healthier, more woodlandy theme for our snack table. I bought some butterfly plant stakes that I put here and there around the house and tables, and did get some rainbows involved in the form of jelly beans and fruit skewers. The rainbow fruit skewers were a big hit!

We put out a variety of crackers, chips, salsa, guacamole, pretzels, peanuts, cinnamon sugar almonds, "veggie sticks", and a veggie platter full of broccoli, red, yellow, green, and orange bell peppers, carrots, celery, and hummus, using various baskets and wooden bowls with cloths lining them. To have enough, I picked up a few more baskets at the thrift store.

(Kaia wearing her special birthday shirt made by Handmade By Jenn, an Etsy shop.)

We prettied the snack table up with green burlap down the center, and scattered it with a rainbow of cloth flowers and pine cones that Kaia helped me collect before hand. I cut a pine branch into slices and rubbed mineral oil onto the cut ends to place candles on, which we set amid the snacks down the center of the table. (Out of reach of little hands!) You'll have to excuse the fact that I didn't get some of these pictures until after the party, and didn't manage to get a picture of the complete table that didn't include other people, which I don't make a habit of posting on my blog. So I'm afraid you'll have to be content with individual elements outside their setting.

And, of course, there was cake. Ohhhhh, the cake. We have a silicone castle cake mold that Kaia desperately wanted to use for her birthday cake, but every time I have tried I cannot get the thing out, no matter how much oil and flour I coat it with. It looks similar to this one. All those pointy turrets and little fiddly bits will not come out for me. (We did use it successfully to make our castle ice lantern, at least.) I was expecting this, but gave it a shot anyway. I am not sure what I am doing wrong, but when the expected happened, we ate the pieces and tried again to make a castle cake, this time by baking sections and constructing it ourselves. That was disastrous, too! The cakes didn't rise at all, (I am wondering if our egg replacer is past its prime, I use it so seldom,) and they certainly couldn't be made into anything approaching a castle. I amateurishly decorated the large one, anyway, and had some fun with all the icing tips I had never used before. And then I baked cupcakes. It's a good thing I started my cake shenanigans a few days before the party.

We had a whole rainbow of fairy wings, (which I also forgot to take a picture of until I only had a few left,) that I found here. They are the butterfly wings, and were all very nice, which is more than I can say for the sloppy, glue smeared ones we looked at in the dollar store. This is the same place we purchased all the cloth flowers.

I asked in our invites to please include in the RSVP a fairy / dragon count, and all the boys went dragon and all the girls went fairy, with the exception of one little girl that wanted to be a dragon, and one little boy who asked if he could be a fairy dragon. Okay, I wasn't shocked, but I did want to give them the option. :) I ordered olive butterfly wings to try converting to dragon wings, which I would say was semi-successful. They weren't large enough to remove the extra pair of wings and not look silly, and I didn't have much play with the wire because the nylon was tightly formed to their original shape. They did get worn, though, so I will take it as more success than fail, even if I wasn't very happy with how they came out. If I had had the time to make 8 pair of dragon wings from scratch, I think they would have been much nicer.

We did feed them all pasta before sugaring them up with cake and candy. We had around 40 people at our house, all told, about half and half in kid to adult ratio between attending parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Since I have only one large burner, and one large pot, I made a few pounds of pasta ahead of time which we made into a yummy pasta salad for the adults to dig into. Then, while the kids were playing, I cooked up a few more pounds of hot pasta for them, which I kept pretty simple with margarine, a little salt, a smidge of powdered smoke, and a heap of nutritional yeast. The kids all ate and liked it, saying that it tasted like mac and cheese, and went unaware of its veganess until I told them. Boy, were they a lot of kids to sit down around a table!

We had a unicorn pinata as well, which I had someone take a video of, but was too distracted trying to keep 20 kids from being smacked with a big stick to remember to take a photo of. It was a fill-yourself pinata, which was nice, enabling me to use all vegan-friendly candies, which I put into separate treat bags before putting into the pinata. We had children aged 1 ½ up to 12 years old, so I didn't want all the big kids getting the whole of the loot. I was afraid this may take some of the excitement out of it for experienced pinata destroyers, but I forgot how powerful the possession of candy is, none of the kids cared. :)

We had a great time, once everything was done and the party was ready to start. I was really happy to get dinner figured out for everyone so that we didn't have to try cramming the whole thing into two hours like we have previously done. It seems so much easier to order pizzas all around! I only know of one pizza place in the area that makes vegan pizzas, though, and they are an hour away and far too expensive for us to provide a party load of people! It was worth it, though. The kids had so much more time to simply play together.

I was also much happier to give out a pair of wings to use in imaginative play to each child, instead of a baggie of plastic junk that would end up broken and in a landfill by the end of the week. I have never given out these seemingly obligatory goody bags, but Kaia has brought home her fair share. Ugh!

 Oh, yes! Kaia did wear her unicorn crown and rainbow tail with her wings for a while, but eventually ditched them for just the wings. It's a good thing she has worn them so much outside the party, or I would have been pretty disappointed after all that work making them for her birthday party!

Make a Rainbow Tail

As promised, a tail tutorial to go with the Unicorn Horn Flower Crown. This tail is a very simple and quick project, and certainly isn't limited to unicorns or rainbows. Kaia specifically wanted a rainbow tail for her unicorn costume, and I thought keeping the bands of colour separate would have more rainbow impact than the strands all being mixed together. 

You will need: 

• Yarn
•  Stick or Large Book
• Needle and Thread 
• Cloth Ribbon (Thin and Wide)
• Tacky Glue (I Used Quick Dry)
• Belt

We picked out Bernat Mosaic Yarn - Psychedelic, their Calypso version is nice, too. 

This yarn has its colours in long sections, so as I pulled the yarn off the skein I wrapped it into equal lengths. This is pretty easy to do by wrapping your yarn around a book, but Kaia wanted a very long tail, one that came all the way to her feet. I held one end of the yarn in my hand, and wrapped it around a crochet hook I held between my knees, back and forth, between hand and hook, until the yarn started to shift to the next colour. Then I cut it.

Make sure both cut ends come out on the same side, even if it means chopping off a little section of yarn before starting your next colour, so that one end of your yarn has only loops. Use another short length of yarn to go under and around the loop end, and double knot it. Trim the knot ends short, (but not so short that your knot might slip out.) Do this for each colour. You will have a separate bundle for each colour.

Once you are through gathering your colours into bundles, run another, longer, length of yarn through all of them and tie them together. This length of yarn goes through the top loop, just as you did for the separate bundles, right under the short length of yarn you already tied. Now the bundles are all tied together on the inside. Wrap yet another length of yarn a handful of times tightly around the outside of the bundles, just below the knots, and double knot it. This sucker is not coming apart.

Cut the loops off the bottom end of the tail, and trim them more evenly. I hadn't trimmed yet in the following photo, but when I did, I cut it in staggered layers so they wouldn't all be precisely the same length. Cut two short lengths of cloth ribbon and ready your needle and thread.

 Wrap the ribbons loosely over the knotted end of your tail, and tack very securely into place. I sewed through the yarn wrapping the end and all the way through the tail. Okay, I didn't do a very pretty job, but it is very secure, and it will not be visible. These are so you will be able to put the tail on a belt.

Put a little tacky glue on the yarn wrapping the knotted end of the tail, and put the wide cloth ribbon around it. Make sure the seam is where you want the underside of your tail will be.Turn the cut end of the ribbon under before tacky gluing it down, and then stitch it in place. My ribbon was wider than I liked, so I actually turned the long edges of it under as well.

Your tail is ready to thread a belt through!

Kaia is as happy as can be with her new unicorn outfit, and I really like the way tying each colour individually keeps the colours in distinct bands. Honestly, I think I would still tie smaller bundles even if I were making it all one colour, just because of how much more securely attached the strands of yarn are this way.

We need to find a better belt for her, but tiny belts are hard to find! We have improvised for now. It doesn't come quite to the floor as she had asked, but I didn't want her, or anyone else, stepping on it and tripping her up, so I made it a bit shorter and she has yet to complain. ;)

She's been galloping around non-stop, and if I thought it was hard to get her to stand still for photos in her headband, it was next to impossible in the full getup!

Her tail has stood up to being brushed no problem, with not a single strand lost.

As always, I would love to know if you tackle this project, and especially if any part of the tutorial is not clear. In case you missed it, I linked up to the unicorn horn flower crown at the beginning of this post. They make a fun set!

(I am sharing this post at The Magic Onions and Frontier Dreams, two sites that give me happy warm fuzzies <3 )

Twig and Maple Seed Dragonflies

I've seen these a few places before, but I really fell in love with the sparkly wings on those that were made at Twig and Toadstool, and knew Kaia would adore them. It was too late in the year for us when they posted theirs last Fall, and no whirlygigs, (or whirlybirds, helicopters, maple keys, or maple seeds!) were to be found, so this project was a long time coming. This year, we were not going to miss out!

You will need some maple seeds, paint and paintbrush, hot glue, twigs, small or seed beads, and either glitter glue, or craft glue and glitter. Cut the wings off of all the seeds.

Match them up into sets, you will need four wings per dragonfly. Kaia had a lot of fun matching them up, then she painted both sides of each wing. She wanted a rainbow of dragonflies, which is not terribly shocking, as she wants a rainbow of pretty much everything. :)

Then she painted the twigs, and, if I do say so myself, I love the way they came out. I showed her how to make stripes on a spare stick, and then she went to town with stripes, spots, and blotches.

We did not have every colour of glitter glue, nor did we have every colour of glitter, so we did a combination. The glitter definitely came out shinier, but they are all pretty. Kaia painted the red and orange wings with glitter glue, and the rest I covered with a coat of Mod Podge (you could simply use craft glue, as well,) before Kaia dumped on the glitter. I was able to do all four wings of each colour at the same time by first putting a dusting of sparkles on my "glitter dump sheet", coating both sides of all wings in Mod Podge, and setting them on the layer of glitter, which kept them from sticking to the sheet as I finished gluing up the others. Then Kaia, ever so liberally, covered them in sparkles. I gave them a little toss in the sparkles before taking them out and funneling the glitter back into its tube.

Lastly, simply hot glue the wings to the twig bodies, and hot glue the beads in place as eyes. You have cute little dragonflies!

Here are all of ours.

We tied strings around them and hung them from the lamp over our dining table.