Tag Archives: where the wild things are party

“Where the Wild Things Are” Birthday Party Invitation

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pinvite

So this post is going to be a little redundant if you’ve already checked out my DIY Invites & Greeting Cards without Photoshop post, but since Baby P’s invite was so stinkin’ cute and so special to me, I think it deserves it’s own post :). Additionally, this tutorial will highlight inserting a picture into your invite whereas my last post was text only. Perhaps most importantly (second only to Baby P’s cuteness, of course lol) is that these invitations cost about $8.00 for thirty (depending on where you choose to have them printed)! Talk about a steal, you can’t even get lame, fill-’em-in-yourself Target brand invites for $8.00 let alone an adorable, custom picture invitation. Please keep in mind, if you are interested in having a WTWTA themed birthday party and love this invitation design please contact me and I will sub in your child’s picture and send you the PDF for free 🙂

NOTE: I will reiterate what I said in my other DIY invitation post. It is legal for you to use copywrited images and characters for your own personal use as long as you are not profiting from that use, however, big corporate print stores like Staples and Office Max are weird about printing things with these types of images (like the WTWTA characters on my invite) and will not do it because technically it is trademark infringement on their part as they profit from your payment to them for printing. Some print stores, like my local Postal Anex are a lot more lax about this kind of thing so bear in mind that you will need to seek out one of these smaller establishments or print them yourself at home or at the library.

As mentioned above, the only difference between this invitation and the example in my DIY Invitations and Greeting Cards post is that this one contains a photograph (which is super easy to ad). For creating the text portion of the invite and adding the characters (which I found by doing a Google search for “Where the Wild Things Are characters”) I will refer you to the previously mentioned post. As for adding a picture simply select: INSERT>PICTURE and retrieve the picture from wherever you have it saved on your computer. Once you have added the photograph you may adjust the size and then select: FORMAT>PICTURE>OUTLINE if you wish to change the color or weight of the outline around the picture (I used a thick yellow outline to match the font). Like the font I used? It’s “Hello, Goodbye” available here via dafont.com, the same one I used when creating my DIY Hand-Painted Where the Wild Things Are Sign. Do you absolutely love my photo of Baby P in his wolf suit? Check out the my DIY Wolf Suit Costume tutorial!

 

DIY Baby Costume – “Where the Wild Things Are” Wolf Suit

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wolfsuit

I know what you’re thinking “enough already with this WTWTA birthday party, I’m so sick of hearing about it I’m about to go burn the book!” lol, almost done, I promise! When I was drafting a post about Baby P’s adorable birthday invite I realized that I just had to share the pictures from my little backyard photo shoot when taking a picture to use for the invite. I was inspired when I found an invitation on Pinterest of a little boy dressed up as the character of “Max” in the most adorable wolf suit and just knew that I had to recreate it for P! The first step was to create a wolf suit. I knew that these were available for purchase but with my already meager party budget I had no business even entertaining the idea of buying a costume, especially to use for only one picture and especially because Pottery Barn Kids was selling them to the tune of $70.00 – say whaaaaat??!!! Anyhow, I figured that since it was just for the invitation it only had to look convincing enough for the recipients to get it when read along with the text so I knew that creating my own wouldn’t pose too much of a challenge, all I needed was a white sweatshirt, pants and a tail of some sort. Surprisingly these items were easy to come by and I say surprisingly because who on Earth would sell a white sweatshirt and pants for tiny humans that are always dirty? Maybe they’re meant to be worn ironically or something, haha anyway, I digress, back to creating the wolf suit. I found the sweatshirt and sweatpants on Amazon because I didn’t have time to run to every second hand store searching for these particular items in his size but if you do by all means find them at a thrift store or ask to borrow them from friends as you wont be altering them in any way. Please read on to see where I found the rest of my embellishments for the costume and of course to see the finished product – the picture of my squishy Baby P wearing it!

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I chose this particular photo to use for the invitation, if you’re interested in seeing how I made it myself check out this post and to find out how you can easily make other greeting cards and invitations without Photoshop, check out this post!

WOLF SUIT

1 pair of white sweatpants

  • 1 white hooded sweatshirt
  • 3 cardboard circles (to make the buttons)
  • 3 medium sized safety pins and 1 large safety pin
  • 1 small piece of faux fur fabric (less than 1/8 of a yard is fine)
  • 1 crown (I fashioned mine out of a left over box and yellow felt fabric but a gold plastic crown would be easy to come by, even a Burger King crown would work! haha)

To assemble the costume all I did was draw a black “X” on each one of the cardboard circles then used the three smaller safety pins to secure them to front of the sweatshirt right beside the zipper. I also cut a small tail out of the faux fur fabric and used the large safety pin to secure it to the inner back of the pants. That’s it! Clearly this is nothing fancy but the outcome was absolutely adorable and it served the purpose I needed. If you are planning to use this as a Halloween costume or want it to be worn for party you can jazz it up a little more with real buttons and by attaching some brown felt or fur feet to the top of their shoes.

Here are just a few of the pictures of P in his wolf suit!

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DIY Favor Tags & Cupcake Toppers – Where the Wild Things Are

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caketopper

So in wrapping up my posts on Baby P’s first birthday bash I figured I’d share one last cute little money saving party idea – DIY favor tags and cupcake toppers! My favor tags were as simple as using the same method I did to create P’s invitation and stapling it to a little baggy of cookies! Due to the wide age range of kids that were going to be in attendance I wasn’t sure what to do for favors but I knew I wanted to do something cost effective, so what’s more cost effective than sugar cookies? Plus I felt that giving something edible really lent itself to the “we’ll eat you up” part of the favor tag. While originally I had planned to make cookies in the shape of a “1” time ended up getting away from me and I just went with simple homemade (and by homemade I mean those ready-to-bake rolls of dough that you buy in Walmart, lol) sugar cookies with sprinkles. I was really happy with how they turned out and even happier that I was able to customize my favor tags to fit the party theme!

close-up of favor tag and cookie bag.

close-up of favor tag and cookie bag.

favors as we displayed them.

favors as we displayed them.

As for the cupcake toppers they were a last minute DIY idea for when I decided that I was going to forgo the idea of having a professional make the cupcakes and smash cake and make them myself. While I’ve gotten crafty with cupcake decorating in the past (check out my margarita and patriotic cupcakes!) I knew that since I needed about sixty cupcakes I didn’t want to commit to any type of elaborate design. In searching various online retailers I came across some pretty adorable cupcake toppers, even some that were already customized to my theme, but in an effort to save some addition money I decided to just create them myself by using Microsoft Word to create little circles with various WTWTA images inside (see my post on DIY Invites & Greeting Cards without Photoshop for more on making some simple designs without fancy computer programs). Once my little circles were printed all I had to do was cut them out and use a glue stick to glue them together around a standard toothpick. While the process was a little tedious it was a super easy and FREE way to jazz up my box cupcakes!

photo 2 (6)photo 5photo 4 (3)

 

TIP: Want an even easier option? Print the favor tags out on shipping labels and simply stick it to a little colored paper baggy. You can apply this same idea to your cupcake toppers by printing out the characters on circular labels and sticking them together around a toothpick so that you can skip the cutting step altogether.

If you’re interested in throwing your own budget-friendly “Where the Wild Things Are” party and would like to use my caketopper and favor tag designs please contact me and I would be happy to share the document with you free of charge!

DIY “Where the Wild Things Are” Tissue Paper Character Poms

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wtwtapoms

Okay, so I’m slowly but surely catching up on posts about Baby P’s “Where the Wild Things Are” first birthday bash (check out my last two posts on my DIY hand painted sign and DIY Pinata) so I’m going to follow those up with a DIY post creating a piece of party décor that seem to be all the rage on Pinterest – tissue poms! Let me start by saying that I love tissue poms, they are SO easy to create (despite the fact that they are sold on Etsy and at local craft stores for much more than they are worth) and are the perfect addition to any party theme, adding a sort of whimsical feel for just a few dollars. Needless to say anytime I host a party of any kind I can always be found floofing (is that a word? lol) and hanging tissue poms right before the event, haha.

When it came time for P’s party I was trolling Etsy for “Where the Wild Things Are” design ideas that I could possibly DIY and came across the most adorable set of character tissue poms that were listed for (hold on to your hats) $54.00!!! That’s right folks, five-four dollars, almost double what it costs me to fill the tank of my SUV (off topic but are you not loving gas prices right now? lol), for an item made up of mostly tissue paper – unreal. I didn’t do any further investigation to see if the item was actually a hot seller (I am to this day blown away by the price, haha) but I’m glad that I was able to use it as inspiration, after all it was as simple as creating a few basic tissue poms and gluing on some construction paper faces!

I don’t have step-by-step photos for this one because as long as you can figure out how to make the poms themselves using either YouTube or Pinterest tutorials then the rest will be pretty self explanatory, all I did was cut the various shapes for the “wild thing” faces out of construction paper and used magic markers to color in where needed. Once I assembled the faces I used Elmers glue to attach them to the front of each of the poms, allowed them to dry and that was that! This was a super easy and fun way to jazz up the party décor and I definitely see myself returning to this idea for future parties, as you can basically create a character from any pom.

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everyone loved these character poms!

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.. a few of the various other poms I used as décor over the food table.

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