A Tangled Themed Birthday Party

This past fall my now six year old daughter, Madi, was in love with Disney's Tangled.  She didn't mind standing in line for 40 minutes to see Rapunzel and Flynn at Disneyland, she wanted to be Rapunzel for Halloween, she wanted to re-decorate her room in a Tangled theme (luckily she didn't self decorate and color her walls like Rapunzel!) and she wanted to have her sixth birthday party with a Tangled theme.

Her birthday always creeps up on me.  I think its because it is the week after Halloween.  I finally get past Halloween and all the costume planning, sewing, searching, etc. and then I realize I have a week to plan a birthday party.  So as usual, I had to quickly gather together some ideas, but in the end I think she was happy.  It had plenty of Rapunzel.  It helped that I found some great ideas on the internet, some of which I have links for below.

I took the easy way out with invitations and just did some from the store.  But there are some fun invitation ideas out there.  Also, recently I came across a Tangled font that would have been fun to use.  It is a free for personal use font and would have made fun invitations.

http://www.fontspace.com/juan-e-b/tangled-v12

For decorations, I got most of my ideas from some blogs and websites.  These are three of the main ones I liked.

http://family.go.com/disney/pkg-disney-character-fun/pkg-everything-tangled/

http://ohamanda.com/2011/01/11/rapunzels-golden-hair-birthday-party/

http://www.supermommoments.com/2011/01/tangled-party-decor-food/

We decided to make some purple flags, with glittery suns to string around the party area.  Madi loved helping with this part.  But what girl doesn't love glitter!?  

 

There were some really cute and amazing cake ideas, but I went simple on this one since I ran out of time and certainly don't have the cake decorating talent that some do.  A tower cake would have been amazing, but I guess I wasn't up to the challenge.  We opted for flowers. (SO not amazing and the purple is kind of blah, but she was happy.)

 I made cupcakes for each of the girls since we wanted to save the cake for the family party later.

I had thought of doing more Tangled themed food, but opted for just cake and ice cream this time.  I know, kind of boring, but time ran out.  But how cute would some braided bread have been!

I printed out some Tangled coloring pages for the girls to color while we waited for everyone to arrive.  The girls really enjoyed this and could have spent more time coloring if we would have had more time.  Here is a link I used.  The Disney website also has some coloring pages.

http://www.coloring-book.info/coloring/coloring_page.php?id=251

Since Rapunzel liked to paint, we did a painting activity first, since they would need time to dry.   I bought an 8 x 10 painting canvas for each of the girls and they had a blast painting with acrylics like a real artist.  Here are a couple of the samples.  It was actually not too messy, but I did warn the parents ahead of time.

Next we played pin the flower on Rapunzel's hair.  I enlarged a picture, traced it on poster board and Madi colored it.  The girls spent a few minutes redecorating her after we finished the game.

We also played a version of musical chairs, only a "non-loser" kind so that there wouldn't be any hurt feelings (as little girls are prone to have!)  Sorry I don't have pictures of this game.  I printed some of the coloring pages from the link above, making sure to have a variety of subjects and having one for each girl.  I also printed off reduced pictures of the same pages (about playing card size) and we colored them all.  To play the game we laid out the large picture in a circle on the floor and each girl stood to the side of one.  We played some music from the Tangled sound track and they danced around the circle until the music stopped. When it stopped, I drew a picture from my stack of smaller ones and the girl standing by the same picture got to choose from a basket of party favors.  We did this until everyone had won a prize.

The party lasted about 1 1/2 hours by the time we opened presents and had cake and ice cream.  Preparing wasn't too bad, only a little bit of work.  But it was fun to do and Madi and I certainly got some quality mommy/daughter crafting time together between the glitter and the coloring.

Project: Organize My Laundry Room

A few months ago I started getting antsy for a new project.  And as I always do when this mood hits, I started looking around my house to see what I could change or reinvent.  This time it was the laundry room that caught my eye.

I started thinking about this cabinet next to my washing machine that was home to a junk drawer and where we kept a dirty clothes hamper.  The top just collected junk and dust.  This is a reasonably uncluttered day for it, trust me, I've seen much, much worse.  I also realized there was wasted space above it and if I built up it would give me more storage.  So out it came.  (I saved the cabinet for another project, though it isn't done yet.)

I came up with some plans, enlisted the help of my husband (thanks Mike!) and we built this cabinet.  Now I'm organized- well, somewhat better organized, at least in my laundry room.

                               And finished!!

I have always wanted to put an ironing board in my laundry room and this gave me the opportunity to do that.  We put in a sliding shelf big enough for a mini ironing board and it works great for small ironing jobs.  There are two dirty clothes hampers on the bottom and now I get to teach my kids to sort by color.  Before the clothes were all together, so now it is nice to have the darks already separated from the whites. There are shelves for the boxes we use for clean laundry, one for each of the kids, and that keeps the baskets off the counter like they use to be.  Now I can actually sort clothes on the counter instead of just using the top of the dryer.  Nice!

Take a look at all that clear counter space while you can!  I'm sure it won't be like that much longer...

And, it matches the lockers we put in a few years ago, which have also been fabulous for controlling messes.  (As long as my kids actually take the time to put their shoes in the shoe shelves. Sigh...)

And one more thing that has helped the clutter in my laundry/mud room are these hooks.  It is just a piece of MDF wood, painted, with hooks attached.  (Super easy project, too.)   But it has been one of the most useful and cheapest things I've made.  In the winter you'll see snow pants and coats hanging on it and in the summer is dries beach towels.  Love it!

I know I'm incredibly lucky to have a handy husband, complete with tools, so we can make things like this.  But even if you can't do a project of this scope, hopefully you've at least found some potentially useful ideas.