Part 2
I'm finally getting the chance to continue with K's 4th birthday party pictures. As you may recall from my
last post we had an Alice in Wonderland theme. The last post focused on the table decorations. In today's post I'll show you a few of the decorations around the house and some pictures of the birthday girl herself.
I took my inspiration from the Disney cartoon version of Alice in Wonderland. Below is a picture of the inside of the front door. I had originally wanted this display to be on the outside of the door but it was raining pretty heavily that day and although the door is protected, I didn't want to risk it getting wet. While the original doorknob has a traditional round "nose", all of
the doors at my parents house have these lever-type handles so ours just
had a really long nose. I downloaded the
talking doorknob template
from the DisneyFamily.com website and instead of crafting my own from
construction paper, etc. like they did, I opened the template in
PhotoShop and reconstructed it piece by piece into one file that I had
printed on cardstock at OfficeMax.
On the table is an empty Captain Morgan's Private Stock rum bottle with a
"Drink Me" label that I made and a cool skeleton key my Mom has on a
ring as decoration in their house.
K wanted to pose with the key by the door so here you get to see her in her Alice dress that my Mom made. I tried helping and did part of it but between both kids, I barely had 10 minutes per night to work on it so thankfully Mom stepped it as our hero and basically made the whole thing. All hail Mom!
Turning away from the front door (basically opposite it) is a coat closet and the hallway to the rest of the house (and a bathroom and office but those are not part of the decoration so I'm leaving them out.) There is a very small space of wall between the coat closet and the hallway and that turned out to be the perfect spot to hang my Directional Arrows. In the movie Alice is trying to find the White Rabbit and comes across an area where there are directional signs pointing every which way. She also runs into the Cheshire Cat who tells her to ask the Mad Hatter or the March Hare. Originally I was trying to figure out how to make a tree in order to stick my arrows on but when I realized this sliver of wall was there, it worked out perfectly!
The Cheshire cat is actually made up of four pieces of cardstock taped together because I wanted him to be really big. I found a black and white image of him online and blew it up in PhotoShop and colored it in and then had it printed at OfficeMax. The arrows were also found online and I added the text and had them printed. They say, "Up/Down, Over/Under, This Way/That Way, Yonder/Beyond". There is one additional one in the middle. Can you read what it says?
In another area of the house was my White Rabbit display. K has a LOT of stuffed rabbits but surprisingly, none of them are plain white. I decided to go with my Mom's ceramic one because I really like it and it went well with the theme. The pocket watch was on loan from my Dad (it was his grandfather's) and the white gloves are from a craft project I want to do but still have never gotten around to making.
I was a little worried about this display with the kids but thankfully the rabbit wasn't broken and no one touched the watch.
During the party I had the movie, Alice in Wonderland, playing quietly for the kids to watch. I think K and her cousin A watched it for approximately 30 minutes but it was fun to look up and see tidbits of it now and then.
To the left of the TV are four frames that contain rotating "art". My
Dad still has an enormous record collection (as in vinyl for those
youngsters reading this). For every holiday we challenge him to come up
with four records that represent said holiday. It's not always easy
since he hasn't bought a new record in I don't even know how many years
but somehow, we all brainstorm and manage to come up with something. For
K's 4th birthday he had, "Jefferson Airplane: Flight Log" which
contains the song, "
White Rabbit". Below
that is "Led Zeppelin: IV", "Eric Clapton: 461 Ocean Boulevard", and
"Dennis Yost and the Classics IV: Golden Greats Volume 1".
A lot of the Alice in Wonderland parties I found online revolved around the Tea Party scene of the movie. While I loved this idea I was a bit worried about using the beautiful white and blue china tea cups from my Mom's great grandmother with the girls. I decided to use just one as a topper on the cake but oh, wait until you see what ended up on top of the cake. SOOO cute! Instead, I used it as a prop for a picture of K:
Part 1 - Decorations
Part 3 - The cake
Part 4 - Food
Part 5 - Gifts & Goodie bags
