I love lights. Absolutely love them! And I’m a fan of sweet things too. So, when I saw the following DIY tutorial I had to tell myself just to blog it as a fab children’s party idea and not to run to the nearest craft store so I could fill my tiny room with big lit-up sweets! They look so awesome though…
Awesome images by Elove Photos
For all the details head over to Oh Happy Day.
So there you go, I’ve blogged them… still sooo tempted to make them mind you ;)
Debs
I have a lovely idea for a party today thanks to photographers Daria & Andy. I spotted their Annual Gingerbread House Decorating Party on their blog and had to ask if I could share! True this is extremely well suited to Christmastime (gingerbread just is Christmas in my eyes) but if you remember the famous fairytale of Hansel & Gretel with its house built of sweets then you can easily make this work any time for a child’s party. And I bet they’d have a lot of fun making these. Maybe more eating them :)
You will need to bake and assemble the houses before the party so the little ones can purely concentrate on the fun part… decorating! Daria & Andy used a recipe and pattern they found here. It’s a good idea to assemble each house on an individual cake board so you can move them easily afterwards. If you’re wondering what the tins seen in the photo are for they’re just to hold the roof up whilst the icing set…
Give each child an individual bowl to collect the sweets of their choice. With this party being at Christmas there are some quite Christmassy sweets included here but of course you can use absolutely anything, provided there are loads of bright colours and everything tastes yummy!
Make sure each child has enough space to decorate their house, complete with a bowl of icing for the glue and something to apply it with such as a palette knife or spoon…
Here are the finished houses and don’t they look amazing! I love that the house in the bottom right image has a hot tub, that’s my kind of house ;)
If you buy a roll of cellophane and string for the party you can wrap each house and let the child take it home with them. Then they can spend the next few days eating it…
Awesome images courtesy of Daria Bishop Photographers
An activity and party bag all-in-one. Ace!
Debs
When searching for ideas for Gavin’s Father’s Day gift, I came across these tutorials by Kristine McKay, and we really liked the personalised jars and bottles idea. We came up with another idea for Father’s Day, but decided to make our own version of these for Gavin’s birthday, which was last week.
We took 6 chutney jars and filled them with his favourite sweets, but you could use drink bottles or any glass jars and fill them with absolutely anything! You could use other sweet or savoury treats or you could even make your own drinks to fill the bottles. It all depends on the recipient’s favourite treat! Then all you have to do is make some jar labels, lid labels and find or make a box to put them in.
I couldn’t find empty jars that were the right shape or size anywhere, so I bought chutney jars and emptied them into a big sealed box, so we could use the chutney later. We chose Gavin’s 6 favourite sweeties and bought enough to fill each jar with a different treat. We covered the lids with cupcake cases, wrapped an elastic band around them and stuck a label on the top, and put the bigger labels onto the jars themselves. The box we used was cut down from a larger cardboard box and just wrapped in some gift wrapping paper, to make it a bit prettier. We also added some strips of cardboard inside to stop the jars from hitting each other.
As well as putting a label on each jar to inform of its contents, we also added an extra label on the back, and on each jar, this label had a different reason why we love Daddy. (I think this might have been his favourite bit!) Alice made our labels on the computer, but you could get the kids to decorate these by hand, for that extra personal touch. It just so happens that Alice is at the ‘I need to do everything on a computer’ stage, so that did make it personal for us :)
The whole thing took just a few hours and less than £10 to complete, but it was Gavin’s favourite present to recieve and our favourite to give! And it’s a great gift for anyone on any occasion, because it’s so personalisable (real word?!).
Verity
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