Maeve's Rainbow Birthday Party

My baby girl turned six this month and we celebrated with a colorful Rainbow Birthday Party!

The invitation is my first-ever made from scratch using Photoshop Elements.  I'm slowly learning the basics, so here's my simple invite!

We invited kids from Maeve's kindergarten class and had a party of eleven including the birthday girl!  Maeve greeted each friend with a handmade rainbow bracelet with their name on it.  It also helped us keep track of who had arrived!

bracelet details here

Food was simple (and store-bought).  gasp!  I simply ran out of time, so I assembled the pretty rainbow fruit platter from pre-cut fruit.  I cut the fruit into smaller pieces so they'd be kid-bite-sized.

I pulled out the handy tiered tray from the tutorial I did last summer.  It made a perfect display for colorful sugar and M&M cookies!

If you do a rainbow party, you must get the rainbow Twizzlers.  They were a huge hit with the kids.  I cut them into thirds; don't they look like tasty confetti?!

My husband made tissue paper poms last year and Maeve ordered them again this year.  They even have scalloped edges! ;)  And they look great on the railing.   

We covered the living room cabinet with my ruffly rendition of the rainbow table skirts I've seen all over blogland.  All for just $9 in materials. It was so colorful!

Click here to learn how I made this table skirt.

A balloon swag filled the hallway and invited guests into the party.  There's the birthday girl showing off her balloons.  She and her brother worked hard blowing up a lot of those!

For activities, I picked up a few rainbow scratch art kits from Michael's.  Each pack came with 6 bookmarks and was only a dollar.   Also at the art table was dyed ditalini pasta and Elmer's glue.  I soaked the pasta in rubbing alcohol & food coloring for one hour, rinsed, then dried overnight.

I found these small pails at Hobby Lobby for a quarter a piece on the clearance shelf b/c they had initials on them.  All that was left were "i" and "u".  Nothing a little spray paint can't fix!  They were perfect for holding the pasta for the art table.

It was a whopping 84 degrees here in Iowa in the middle of March!  That's ridiculous...but we took advantage of it by having outdoor activities, including the art table (translation: less mess)!

Two clear boxes filled with skittles and M&Ms asked the kids to guess how many.  The guesses ranged from 20 to 2000!  The winners got to take the candy home!

Maeve didn't want (another) birthday cake - "because we had one for my family birthday party" last weekend.  Instead she requested jello!  These were topped with whipped topping, if the kids wanted it.

And then it was pinata time!  I loved the idea of a homemade pinata -- not so much the idea of paper mache, though.  Becky at Infarrantly Creative has a great tutorial for a paper bag pinata.  Love.  Fastened to the swing set.  Easy.  Here's how mine came together.

paper bag pinata details here

The favors were simple, handled white sacks with a line up of ribbons 'rainbowing' out of the top.  (pretty sure that's not a word, but I'm going to use it anyway).  The bags are filled with gum balls, flavored tootsie rolls, balloons, Twizzlers, and stickers - all of the rainbow variety, of course!

favor bag details here

It was such a fantastic party!  And what generous gifts she received from friends!  (And a special day for mom and dad, too!). 

linkin up at the usual places and here