For Addy's 3rd birthday, we had an Elmo Carnival. It was a very fun party & there was a lot that went into the planning. As you have probably noticed throughout this blog, my parties usually go one of two ways...either I throw them together super last minute or I plan them for like a year. This was one of those year-long planned out events...mostly because I took long breaks in the planning.
I come up with ideas in a strange way. For this party, I decided on the carnival idea because while at a consignment sale in September 2013, I found a popcorn maker that reminded me of a carnival & thus, this party was born. : ) I didn't want to just do a carnival, but wanted to also incorporate something Addy loves. There is a lot of red in carnival themed parties & what else is red? Elmo. So I decided to combo the two. The first thing I did (besides buy the sweet ass $2 popcorn maker) was work on the invitation.
I got the inspiration for the Elmo face invitation & the envelope here at Inspire, Design & Create. I loved the idea of an Elmo face, with the party information on the back. I wasn't exactly sure how to make the Elmo face & definitely didn't trust myself to freehand it, so upon a search of Pinterest, I found a template at scribd.com. I printed off the template & traced it onto red cardstock paper. I then used the bottom of a round salt shaker to trace a circle & cut out white circles for eyes & orange circles for noses. I used a sharpie for the eyes & the mouths.
When it came to the invitation information, I saw some super cute ideas at Bringing Home Ezra. I loved the ideas of the different fonts for the invitation. So here are the different fonts I used. For the "COME ONE, COME ALL" I used the Algerian font that you can find in Microsoft Word. For ADDY's 3rd BIRTHDAY", I used the Bernard MT Condensed font from Word. For "It's An" I used Brush Script from Word. For "ELMO CARNIVAL", I went to http://www.fontspace.com/rick-mueller/coffee-tin & downloaded the Coffee Tin font. It was perfect for this invitation. Is it weird that I had never gone & downloaded a font before? I hadn't, but I was super excited to find this one. : ) For the "ADMIT ONE", I again used the Algerian & this time I bolded it. & for the "FOOD, GAMES & PRIZES", I used the Bernard MT Condensed again. Finishing up the invite with the date is the Algerian again, this time non-bolded.
My other dominant color for the party besides the red & white stripes was pink, so I found some striped pink paper at Hobby Lobby & printed off the invitation wording onto it. To make it "ticket-looking", I just cut sort of a J (or a backwards J if it was the other side) out of the corners.
So naturally, I don't know what I did with the photos of the envelopes I used, but here is another shot of the super cute ideas at Inspire, Create & Design. I did similar envelopes, but I just used the extra white circles & orange noses from the invitation faces & used those on the back on the envelopes too. Then on the front of the envelopes, they had the addresses & then "G is for Gabriela", "N is for Nolan" & so forth for each kid invited.
If you want to have a carnival party or if your kid is obsessed with Elmo the way mine was this past year, then Pinterest is your friend. We went to another Elmo party about a month after Addy's party & there were tons of super cute ideas from Pinterest there too. What did we do before Pinterest guys? Probably got a lot more work done... ; )
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