JAKES Place: K's 4th Birthday Party - Alice In Wonderland; Food

Part 4

Hopefully you're not sick of hearing about this party (yet). I only have one more post after this one and that will wrap it all up. Tonight I'm covering food, more decorations, and Little Sis.

The party started at noon so I knew we'd want to have some actual food and not just desserts. We served barbecue meatballs, pasta salad, Hawaiian salad and three kinds of deli spirals. In the picture below you can see the Birthday Banner I downloaded from the website In Good Company. They have an amazing free download called Bride In Wonderland that includes the full alphabet buntings as seen below (I had to really darken up my picture to see the banner because my flashed washed them out so much). I also used their food picks and bookmarks which you will see a bit later in this post. I love it when such talented designers let you use their creations for free. So awesome!

Also in the picture you can see my food tent cards. They are quite literally playing cards and all I did was print out the name of the food in a border that I had printed and taped onto the backs of the cards with double sided tape. In keeping with the theme of the Card Guards and K's fourth birthday, each food tent card has a red and a black 4 in two corners and two suits from the playing cards. I stood them up using clothes pins. They looked pretty cute (there's a close up of one in the post about the cake) but were kind of pointless so I probably won't do food tent cards at any other party.

Below is the dessert bar. The cake is obviously the main highlight but there are several other details I would like to share. The two tissue paper flowers are from a Martha Stewart tutorial. Mine turned out kind of wonky. Maybe I did them wrong... In the center is the paper lantern K made. She really wanted to help with the party decorations and I was happy to let her. She also helped me make the smaller yellow poms in the blue vases. Those turned out a lot cuter. I also want to point out the jumbo polka-dot teacups. I found those on clearance at Michael's along with the two charger plates. They looked super cute stacked and filled with meringue cookies. We also had one of my favorite desserts, Seven Layer Bars - yum!

Unfortunately, in the photo above you can't see the super cute flamingo pencil on loan from my Mom for the Guess Me Jar. (In case you don't remember the flamingo reference, Alice plays croquet against the Queen of Hearts using flamingos as the mallets and a hedgehog for the ball.) Mom and I filled a jar with jelly beans and had people guess how many were in it. The closest guess won. Everyone except for my grandpa and brother guessed way low with my brother being closer so he got to take home the prize.

The drink bar was a fun space to decorate. As you can see, there are two more of my tissue paper poms. These turned out a little bit better. Aside from the usual stash of soda pop, I made a raspberry lemonade punch from a Martha recipe and it was super easy and very tasty. I also had iced tea since part of the theme of the whole party was a tea party, and mini bottles of water that I covered with Drink Me labels. In the back you can see my flamingos and hedgehog (see the note about their significance to the movie above.)

These straw toppers are from the Bride in Wonderland
download I mentioned above with the birthday banner.

And last, we can't forget Little Sis. E had her own special wardrobe for the occasion. The funniest part about her outfit is I bought this pack of Alice onesies before she was even born. I have ideas for each of the girls birthday parties planned out for the next, oh... 6 or 7 years. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that I will end up doing them all but what it does mean is that when I see something that will work in the dollar section at Target or the perfect shirt, I'm going to buy it. I have a big plastic storage container that I stock with party supplies for future parties. I know, I'm crazy. Get over it ;)