Mermaid Under the Sea 4th Birthday Party with Free Printable

Miss Matilda knew exactly what kind of birthday party she wanted this year........Mermaid Under the Sea. She said the birthday was for all mermaids, not just Ariel (the Little Mermaid), but that she could come too. She said all mermaids and sea creatures were welcome. She's an inclusive type of little girl.

Matilda's birthdays are always so fun because she is a July birthday (just like me), so we can have her parties outside! As I shared with you yesterday, we used her mermaid birthday outfit as a jumping off point for the party decor, but tried to stick with pink and blue as per the birthday girl's request.

The table decorations are my absolute favorite part! I love a good tablescape.

I had this old frame sitting in my studio that I bought for 25 cents at our local thrift shop. I used a piece of burlap that I already had around from when I made some Burlap Covered Lamp Shades a year or so ago. I taped the burlap to the back of the empty frame. Then I took a star fish that my mother-in-law had brought the kids back from the beach and hand sewed it around the center to the burlap. I love how this turned out. Rustic and beachy.........and less than $1.00!

I found a lot of the party decor at the Dollar Tree store. I bought a bunch of bags of glass beads that are meant to go inside of vases for the table. My intention was that they would look like sea glass. I bought some bags in aqua blue and some in a mixture of blues and greens.

I have about a gazillion mason jars around the house, so I grabbed one of my favorite blue ones and filled it with sand and some seas shells.

I took a hurricane vase that usually has pinecones inside it and filled it will sand and put more seashells on top. I purchased the bags of seashells also from the Dollar Tree store. Who knew they had so much beachy decor?

For the 'Welcome Mermaids' sign, I took an old school house chalkboard that I purchased several months ago at our local flea market and simply wrote the words on there with a blue chalk marker. The flowers and beads around the sign are leis that I purchased again at Dollar Tree and gave them to the ladies to wear at the party.

I also purchased 10 grass hula skirts from the dollar store and put them around the bottom of the table and hung them from the top of the canopy.

I made a simple and easy pennate banner with fabric from Matilda's birthday outfit. I didn't even finish the edges on the triangles, I thought if it frayed that it would add to the rustic, beachy feel. I attached the triangles to some rickrack trim I already had. This took me about 20 minutes to make, but I love how it incorporates the fabric into the look of the party.

These were little striped favor boxes with a seashell foam sticker added to the front of them that I used to serve pirates booty for the kids. It seems like all the kids love that stuff!

You can't have an under the sea party without fishies, right? For the food labels, I designed the main label on the computer, cut them out, backed them with some scrapbook paper and added a toothpick.

We called the pink lemonade 'Mermaid Juice'. It was a big hit.

My husband gave me a hard time about these because he said they looked like jello shots. But I found these little cups and just thought they were the perfect size for kids jello at a party. I filled the blue cups with blue raspberry jello and set them on top of brown sugar (to look like sand).

Here is the fruit that we served. I just called it 'Paradise Fruit Salad' because that sounded beachy and mermaid-like to me. The shell of the pineapple was kept together to use it as kind of a boat for the fruit salad. My mom (Grandma Jane) who was visiting from Texas helped me with this one. Isn't it pretty?

I was pretty excited about this little food project. We took two vanilla wafer cookies, spread strawberry frosting on each side and put a yogurt raisin in the middle to look like an oyster with a pearl inside. I just thought these were so cute. We also drew some lines with a blue frosting gel pen on top of the cookies to look kind of like a shell. So fun!

We served spinach dip and some different chips and called it 'Seaweed Dip'.

I made some rice krispie treats and cut them out in the shape of fish. Our little guy, Caspian, could not get enough of these!

We picked up some wraps from Costco and called them 'Seaweed Sprials'. You could definitely make these yourself, but sometimes I just like to make my life a little easier and go with a few store-bought items.

The girls picked out these chocolate gold coins at the party store. They chose pink and blue and one orange one for the birthday girl. I told them to count out 30 to put in their bag. When I gave them to the cashier and told him I didn't know exactly how many they got........it turns out 30 turned into 73. Oh well.......we are rich in chocolate around here!

And the most popular party food.......the Shark gummies! The kids went nuts over these and they were a fun addition to the Mermaid Under the Sea Party.

How about some salt water taffy to go with the 'sea' theme?

Here is the pretty Little Mermaid birthday cake and here is what happened right before Miss M. blew out the candles......

Little brother had to put is three fingers in the cake.........do you see his finger marks in the picture above. That guys loves his sweets, so I guess he couldn't wait for cake. Oh brother.

Here is the birthday girl blowing out the candles on her cake!

Matilda has been asking for a bounce house for about 4 months now, so we decided to surprise her with one for her birthday. It was a present from my mom (Grandma Jane) and Pepo. You should have seen the look on the girls face when the folks delivered this and started blowing it up. They could not even contain themselves. It was a lot of fun and even I (and Daddy, Grandma and Pepo) did quite a bit of jumping the day before the party. Talk about a fun workout! And it was 'sea' themed........of course.

I made an easy appliqued shirt for Savannah to wear at the party as well. I didn't want to make her a full outfit since this was Matilda's special day, but she was really excited to have a little something mermaid to wear at the big party!

And in case you missed my other post about Matilda's Birthday Outfit........here is the big 4 year old on her birthday!

All and all it was such a great party and I had so much fun putting this together for little Matilda. Luckily my girls get just as into all of this as I do and love helping out! We gave the kids that came to the party a stuffed dolphin, a blue and silver hula hoop and a mermaid coloring / sticker book.

Here are some of the printable labels I made, if you want to download those for your own Mermaid Under the Sea party!

And here is a blank set if you want to add your own text for whatever fun party food you might have at your own child's party.

Again, Happy Birthday to my sweet little girl!

I'm so blessed to have these children and it is such a pleasure to get to spend this time making their birthdays as special as can be!

Pin It

Rainbow Unicorn Birthday Party with Free Printables

This past weekend we celebrated Miss Savannah's 5th birthday with a Rainbow Unicorn themed party. She loves rainbows and unicorns and wanted them combined into one great big birthday party! Today I'm excited to share some party details with you and I've also included some of the printables I came up with in case you would like to print them up and use them for your next Rainbow Unicorn party (whenever, and if ever, that may be).

I ordered Savannah's birthday invitations from minted.com. I love their site. They always have really classy and unique designs and I thought this one fit our rainbow theme just right. You can find this invitation here.

I added some pink zig zag washi tape to the back of each of the silver envelopes for some added detail.

Above are the treat bags we took for Savannah's class. We decided to go with the rainbow theme there as well and I created a little label to attach to each bag. If you want to bring treats at our preschool, they must be individually wrapped, so that's why we did these bags instead of something like cupcakes.

Here is the label I created for the treat bags for her class. I simply sized it down and printed out as a wallet sized picture.

For the main party food table, I wanted to do a rainbow tablecloth, but didn't want to buy one. As you know, I have a lot of fabric, so I just grabbed some of my yardage in rainbow colors and layered several yards on top of one another for a rainbow effect. Easy and inexpensive.

I also made some paper rosettes out of scrapbooking 12" x 12" paper. Each rosette has three sheets of paper and is secured together with staples that were done so they don't show. I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to hang these on the wall, but I ended up just threading a needle with embroidery floss and threading the floss through two spots on each rosette so they hung all on one string. This actually held up great and looked pretty in our sunroom window.

I love making paper pom-poms. I first did these about 2.5 years ago at Matilda's Summer Garden Party. I think they are a great way to fill up large spaces with colors that go with the party theme. We had a large bunch in one corner of the living room and another big bunch next to the main food table.

I strung a rag garland across one of our living room windows. This was the same garland I used for Savannah's Orange 4th Birthday party, but I added in some of the fabrics that coordinated with her dress.

I had the dining room set up for the kids with a unicorn craft project and strings to make fruit loop necklaces. I used a red tablecloth that I already had and made a runner from rainbow striped wrapping paper. The kids had a great time doing the crafts! After the crafts were complete, the dining room was a great place for them to eat their lunch.

Now onto the food........my favorite part.......

As a sweet treat, I made some rice crispy treats using Fruity Pebbles cereal. They were nice and rainbow-y and were super-sweet!

For the adults, I created a roasted veggie, cheese and baby greens sandwich. They were SO delicious. I will have to share the recipe with you. For the kids, we served hot dogs and called them 'Unicorn Dogs'.

I made a pasta salad with a rainbow of different ingredients. It was light and fresh tasting.

I thought this fruit rainbow platter turned out so pretty. I used strawberries, fresh pineapple, kiwi and blueberries. The marshmallows on the sides are supposed to look like clouds. Savannah loves kiwi, but you could also use green grapes for the green and add in an orange layer with clementines or other orange fruit.

We got some Bugles and called them 'Unicorn Horns'.

Savannah loves black olives so she requested we have a bowl full of olives.

I'm not really into baking. It's ok, but what I really love is cooking. So I decided to get a rainbow cake from Costco and added a plastic unicorn on top that I found at Joann Fabrics. If you've never had a Costco cake, they are really good and a very economical option.

We use mason jars for just about everything around here. I took some fabric from Savannah's birthday dress and tied it around each jar that contained the silverware.

I found these fun napkins and plates at Target. I thought the colors were just perfect. I found the little paper trays in the clearance section of Hobby Lobby and they were so great for the kids (and the adults liked them too). They held their hot dogs and side goodies without having to worry about anything falling off of a plate. I will definitely try to find some of these for our next party.

I used party blowers as rainbow decoration for the table and of course, the kids loved playing with those. We had some striped paper cups for the parents to use for goldfish crackers or other treats for the kids.

We had 24 rainbow colored balloons around the house and then this one giant unicorn balloon. Savannah was over the moon with excitement when my husband and her Grandpa brought it into the house. Look at her expression.......she was a happy little girl.

Here were the treat bags for the kids attending the party. Each bag had a bunch of different little things.......such as a new pack of crayons, bracelets, pencils, rings, a necklace, smarties and a couple lollipops.

Here are some of the labels I created for the different food. You are welcome to download these and use them for your party.

Also, here is the rainbow background and the rainbow background with the blank label if you'd like to pull it into some photo editing software and add your own text. I don't consider myself a graphic designer, but I'm pleased with how the rainbow stripe turned out and I can try to show you how I created that in a tutorial, if you are interested.

Savannah and I worked on this party together with her helping me make decisions all along the way from picking out the fabric for her dress, the food, the cake, ect. We had so much fun!

As the party was coming to a close, Savannah said, "This was the best day of my life".

And that.......makes it all worth it.

PS: You can find more details about Savannah's Rainbow Unicorn Dress by clicking HERE.

Pin It