Royal Birthday Ball -4yr - Pass the Teapot

The invitations were on die-cut 5x7 card of a little curly, blonde haired girl dressed up in pink and purple princess attire. Our daughter picked this one, but we had to buy this paper because it really looked like our Emma! On her gown we printed the wording in hot pink:  "Hear Ye!  Hear Ye!  Your presence is requested!  Princess Emma’s 4th Royal Birthday Ball, Saturday, August 13th  The Ball begins at 2pm until the last stroke of 4.   The  ______ Castle, address  RSVP to Queen Renee,  Wear your Princess attire!" Thirteen little girls attended, ranging in age from 2-8.   

I decorated the front door with a pink swagged drape made of plastic table cloth tied up in each corner of the door frame with purple tuele bows. The drape hung down each side of the door and really looked cute!  I made a sign for the front door out of pink poster board written in my calligraphy saying:  Welcome all princesses to Princess Emma’s 4th Royal Birthday Ball!  I wrote the words in dark pink accented with purple glitter glue.  I cut out two crowns from silver mylar for each top corner, decorated in purple and pearl white glitter glue.  Also adding glitter hearts around the bottom.   I attached it to the door with a gold door hanger and then secured it to the hook with a pink bow made from a scrap of the table cloth. 

I took another pink table cloth, folded it in half longways and ran it from under our Welcome doormat down the 4 brick stairs to the walkway.  I secured this with a brick on each side of the runner on each stair.  It worked fine and didn’t even tear with all the children and parents coming and going.  I was really surprised about this.  The parents said the girls were excited driving up and seeing this entrance.  Upon entering, each princess, who each came in their own princess attire, had their picture taken with the birthday girl (dressed in her princess wedding dress, a birthday present from her grandparents) by King Daddy.  My husband was dressed in a homemade crown of poster board covered in silver mylar paper, a homemade medalian necklace from a plastic can lid, craft foam, jewels and ribbon, and my 6 year old son’s magician cape I made him for school. 

I was dressed as the Queen in a floor length bridesmaid’s dress, my long white gloves from my own wedding, pearl jewelry, and my hair up with one of my daughter’s toy tiaras.  The girls were both surprised and tickled that I had dressed up, too, so I’m glad I did now.  My son  dressed up as the prince (we had persuaded him to help). He wore his king’s red velvet cape and crown that I had made him three years earlier for his Old King Cole party (his name is Cole).  I gave each girl a princess coloring book with their name on it that I made from printing off coloring sheets off the Disney website of each of the princesses. 

One at a time I had a friend apply play make-up to each girl at a little play vanity set that I borrowed from a neighbor.  It had a big mirror so they could each see themselves.   I had moved around the furniture in our family room to get the most floor space for the group activities and the dancing to later follow.  I took two more plastic tablecloths, all bought from the dollar store, one pink, one lavender and stripped them each into four long strips.  Then I taped together the four pieces of each color, and draped each one from corner to corner of the room’s ceiling held up by one tack on each end. I did this two nights before and it really held well. 

I also attached them in the center on our ceiling fan.  The appearance was a giant x shape and really looked cute.  I hung 3  pearlized  balloons from the ceiling fan of white, pink and lavender with silver metallic curly ribbon hanging down from the center.   I also took the extra from the ends of these banners and draped them on the entrance to the family room.  I draped the coffee table with another smaller piece of pink table cloth, and used a teapot I had bought from a thrift store filled with purple silk tulips from the dollar store as the centerpiece.  The kitchen is adjoining to the family room and I had covered my table with another lavendar plastic disposable tablecoth.  I also had brought in our Little Tykes picnic table and covered it with a remnant of table cloth left over from the dining room table.   

Once all the children had arrived, had a chance to color, get make-up and play tea party with a few toy sets I had put out, we played Kiss the Frog Prince.  I had made a poster again out of light pink posterboard, cut out a neon green frog, glued it on, cut out a mylar silver crown put that on, and then decorated the crown with purple glitter glue.  I drew, cut out, and glued on a castle from purple construction paper looking at a picture from one of my daughter’s coloring books.  Each princess had lipstick applied and was blindfolded with a scarf, spun around and tried to kiss the frog on the lips!  The closest one was the winner.  This was cute, but for some reason not all the girls wanted to do this one, I think I had 9 do it out of the 13.  The ones who chose not to play continued to play with the tea sets or some of my other daughter’s toys that had been put out (play kitchen things, baby doll stuff, etc..) 

Next I read the girls a short story from the Disney Princess party book about Cinderella wanting to dress up and go to a fancy party.  It was only about 7 pages and was just the right length for their attention spans.  Next we played Pass the Teapot.  I took by Daughter’s plastic play tea pot and filled it with wrapped candy.  The girls sat on the floor in a circle and I played the Disney Princess Tea Party CD music (I also borrowed this from a neighbor).  The girls passed the teapot around and everytime the music stopped, whoever was holding the teapot, took out a piece of candy and proceeded to the next activity, making beaded necklaces.  This worked out PERFECTLY!  No one got upset leaving and everyone was occupied throughout.  The last one holding the teapot got two pieces of candy(they didn’t seem to care who was the winner and I had planned to downplay winners for this age group.  I never even announced who was closer to the frog’s mouth in the first game and no one asked!!!! 

The necklace station, I had several bowls of various beads of different shapes and sizes, all pink, purple, clear and pearl colored.  I used the stiff stretchy plastic cording and it worked well for all ages.  Knots were hard to tie, though, with this stuff.  Some only did this for 5-10 minutes, others went on for up to 20+ minutes.   Again when children would finish, they would go back to playing with the toys out.  Now it was about 3:00, half way through the time allotted.    The tea party was next!  The girls were ushered into the dining room that I had managed to squeeze in an additional small table to fit up against my dining table.  It fit all the girls!  I dressed the tables as one long table and you never would have known with all the stuff decorating it!  The table cloth was another pink disposable covered in a white clearish lace plastic table cloth (All in all, I used 10 tablecoths for tables and decorations, a total of $10).  With the lace one on top, it made it look like a very light pink.  Very cute! 

I had taken another pink tablecloth, stripped into two and taped on the end to drape over my curtain rod.  A purple tuele bow kept it in place.   I used large white doilies as placemats, clear glass dessert plates( I had bought these for another party at Linens ‘N Things for a dollar each, so I wasn’t too worried if one got broken), white  tea cups and saucers from an old hand-me-down dish set I still had, some were chipped, but they were perfect and I had exactly enough!, lavendar plastic spoons and forks, and pink and purlple paper napkins.  I folded each napkin as a fan and placed it in the tea cup, alternating pink and purple.  I made place cards out of pink construction paper cut with zigzag edged scissors and drew a little crown with a silver and gold paint pen on each.  I had found little plastic glass slippers, 6 for $1 at the Dollar Tree and put one slipper by each place card.   

The centerpieces were two ceramic flower pots decorated in yellow tulips (from Everything for a $1 Store) filled with more pink and purple silk tulips and pansies.  These centerpiece flowers were actually pens for the girls to take home at the end.  I took each flower, attaching it to a ballpoint pen by wrapping the two pieces together with green floral tape (each pen ended up costing under 20 cents to make and I made all 14 of them in under 45 minutes).  I had purchased the pens with different ink colors, pink, red, and green. I filled each pot with dry black eyed peas which allowed me to arrange the flowers easily and it made it easy for the girls to pick them at the end ( I first tried floral Oasis, but it got really messy, when I tried to pull out the pens!).  I had borrowed two children’s  silver tea sets  from friends and used these along with creamers and teapots I bought from the thrift shop as table decorations.  I used my 3 plate stacker rack and bought 6 sliver plates, again from the Dollar Tree ( I LOVE THE DOLLAR TREE by the way!).  The funny thing with these dollar silver trays, they were intermingled with some actual silver pieces and the moms were saying,  where did you get all the silver?  NO one could believe they weren’t real! 

I had taken more tuele ribbon and made bows for the flower pots and the handle of the serving rack.  Tied the back of some of the chairs with the purple tuele as well.  (All bows from one good sized  roll of tuele from Michael’s Craft Store for $2.99, I believe).  The table looked fabulous and the girls were drawn to it throughout the party to look at everything.  Food served was homemade sugar cookies decorated in pink and red sugar (my daughter and I did these together the day before), pastel colored mini marshmallows in a big silver bowl, pastel skittles served from my silver sugar skuttle and scoop (they LOVED doing this!), mini blueberry muffins, pink sugar wafer cookies, flower ring butter cookies,  Carr’s tea biscuits and blueberry wafer biscuits, and fruit skewers of apple, pineapple, red grapes and strawberrys.  I used paper parasols left over from a luau we had the year before to skewer the fruit. 

To drink was pink lemonade and Raspberry Iced Tea.  I had really wanted the girls to be able to serve their own drinks so I had gathered through borrowing and thrift shop hunting 11 small teapots/ creamers that I filled and skattered on the table.  This was a little disappointing to me because some of the moms felt the need to do it for the girls.  IF I had known this, I probably wouldn’t have spent all the time gathering teapots that I didn’t mind getting broken!  I had bought a cute teapot that stacked on its own teacup for my daughter to feel special.  It was decorated in a subtle Christmas theme (party was in August), but she never noticed and loved it!! 

I next served the cake and ice cream.  I love making cakes for my kid’s birthdays, but I knew that I would be really busy with this particular party prep, so I opted for Publix’s bakery Disney Princess 2-tier castle cake.  It was adorable!  The cool thing about this cake is the plastic pieces that turn it into the castle.  There is the topper for both layers that have that classic cut top of a castle, the base between the 2-layers and then a crown top with plastic flag.  There were also 6 plastic windows with each of the 6 Disney princess looking out.  I’m saving all these pieces because now making a castle cake will be a cinch AND look great! 

The cost is more than a typical half-sheet cake from their bakery, $38.  I made an awesome castle cake for my son’s king party, but it took me two days and lots of supplies, so cost wise, it wasn’t all THAT much cheaper to do it on my own!)  Ice cream was the small little vanilla cups (I tried to stay away from chocolate because my dining room chairs and carpet are really light in color). With all the food I served in the beginning, my husband and I were sure that no one would TOUCH the cake.  We only had one small piece left over! 

After the girls ate, I led them into the family room again for the ball.  I had the girls line up to pick out a magic wand for the dance.  I bought these cool flashing light wands (Dollar Discount) and attached 2- 3 ft long ribbons to each one  to twirl around with.  I used 7 different types of ribbon and I thought this might be a problem with choosing, but it wasn’t at all.  I turned on the princess music again and we twirled and spiraled our wands around for about 10 minutes.  The princesses were very cute and serious during their dancing!  By this point it was almost 4:00, so I asked the moms if we could quickly open gifts still and we did. 

The party wrapped up around 4:15.  Each girl was given a goodie bag which was a pink or purple plastic backpack (purchased from Everything for a $1) that I had painted with Princess _____ and drawn a crown with paint pens.  Each was filled with a plastic tiara, princess sticker sheet,  brush and mirror set, several plastic bracelets, 2 strings of pink and purple Mardi Gras beads,  hair elastic, set of hair clips,  play make-up lipstick,  ball,  plastic Frisbee with the Disney Princesses on it, it sounds like a lot , but the total was around $4.75 for each one.  They also got to take home their wand, their glass slipper, coloring book and flower pen.   

We've started doing Emma's thank you notes and will include the photo of her and the guest taken in the beginning in each one. My daughter had such a great time, not only during the party, but with all the preparation leading up to it.  She played a big role in making the posters, baking the cookies, setting the table, filling the goodie bags, etc..  All our time and hard work paid off with a party we will hopefully always remember!