Manic Mama Miles: 2016

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Marquee Sign for Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday Party

If you remember from Addy's Elmo Carnival, I like some lights as part of the table centerpiece decoration. So Addy's 4th Frozenfest birthday party was no exception. Since it was a movie themed, I wanted to do a marquee sign.

I started with a giant piece of foam core. Then I marked the edges or where I wanted to cut.

I drew out some shapes of what I wanted to cut, then used an exacto knife to cut the edges off. Hallelujah, I didn't cut myself. Small victories.

After I had the shape of the sign I wanted, I used the cardboard that holds the lights as a guide to space out how far apart I wanted them. This is very similar to the Addy lights I did at the Elmo carnival.

Once I made all the circles for the holes, I took scissors & stabbed them through & then kinda turned them in a circle shape until I made a hole big enough to fit the lights through. Spoiler alert, making holes in this foam core was so much easier than making holes in the wooden letters from the Elmo Carnival.

Before putting the lights in, I finished the front of the sign. I had bought blue foam core & I used my Cricut to cut the letters out of glittered scrapbook paper. Then I took the spray adhesive & a little silver glitter to finish off the sign & make it a little more sparkly for my sparkly girl Addy.

I then put in the lights from the back & dropped the cord down in between the two pieces of snow roll on the backdrop.

Click Below for More Info on This Party
Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday
Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday Decorations
Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday Food
Movie Clapboard for Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday
Marquee Sign for Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday

Movie Clapboard for Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday Party

As you can see, this movie clapboard was initially done for the first scheduled party day pre-1000 year flood. This clapboard was pretty easy, except for keeping things even. I used my cricut to cut out all the letters & the lines. Then I cut out the arrow parts from cardboard. This is just a piece of foam core board I had around the house from a previous project. I spray painted it great & used some of the spray on snow to give it a little texture. The worst part of this was trying to keep all the letters even. My OCD was out of control with this. I also didn't estimate correctly how far apart to space the letters, so I had to do them a couple of times. But in the end, it worked out ok & was a cute part of the decorations for Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday Party!

Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday Party Decorations

For the decorations for Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday party, I was able to use a lot of things I had already for Christmas. I am a little Christmas crazy, so any excuse to have more Christmas ornaments, I'm cool with. I started planning this party immediately after Addy's Elmo's birthday when she turned 3, so I just waited until after Christmas & bought a bunch of stuff at super cheap prices.

I started the backdrop with a giant man's suit box. I cut it up & taped it up really well to stabilize it some. I will say, I did not love this backdrop. It was a little heavy so it was hard to stand up. So...I did something a little crazy & I hope my husband isn't reading this. I actually nailed two small nails through the backdrop into the wall to keep it stable. That wall is full of nail holes anyway & we really only go in there for parties where that wall is covered, so that's okay right? Ha. But anywho...

After I taped it all up, I covered it in a light blue Dollar Tree tablecloth.

Then I took a "snow roll" that I had gotten at Walmart for like 90% off after Christmas & I covered the backdrop with that as well.

Then I went to work attaching things to the backdrop. See the silver things? They were random clear plastic movie reels that we had found at work cleaning stuff out. They were tossing them, so I took them home & spray painted them silver. I took those & all of the silver & blue snowflake ornaments I had gotten on sale & I attached them to the backdrop. Now by attached, I mean I sewed those suckers on. I'm not going to lie, it sucked. I used the clear fishing line that I use for a ton of my party stuff & a heavy duty sewing needle.

I just took the clear string & sewed it back & forth through the cardboard backdrop, attaching the reels & snowflakes. It sucked, but it wound up looking cute.

I also used the clear string to make an icicle banner for the top. I also tied white snowflake ribbon in between every other icicle to space them out a little.

Since it was a movie themed party, I made a marquee sign for the centerpiece. You can find out more info on that here.

For the rest of the decorations, I used a movie clapboard I made (see more info on that here), part of Addy's Frozen castle she had gotten the Christmas before, some sparkly blue trees from Hobby Lobby, a table runner I got on super sale & some silver candles.

Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday Party

Full disclosure, this party is a year old. We actually just celebrated Addy's 5th birthday, but I'm slightly (ok ridiculously) behind, so here we go. Addy was obsessed with Frozen last year. Not much has changed. Everyone was doing Frozen parties then, so I decided to change it up just a little & plan a Frozen Drive-In Movie party. The idea was to have the food table set up indoors & then watch the movie outside on our new blow-up movie screen that I had requested as my birthday present. I was gong to make little boxes for them to sit in & it was going to be a great fun time outdoors. October is when weather gets halfway decent in South Carolina...except for this year...when we had the 1000 year flood. Addy's outdoor party was scheduled right in the middle of the flood. We moved it to the next weekend, but everything was still so messed up from the flood, we weren't able to do anything inside. So we had the party inside & we put Frozen on the playroom TV. Improvising at it's finest. Ha. But the kid's still had a great time & really weren't the wiser as to what the original plans were.

I'm going to do a separate post on decorations, but this is what the main party table looked like in the daytime. This was our first nighttime birthday party. Initially that was so it would be dark enough for the movie. Small lesson learned, when kids eat tons of chocolate & sweets this late, they will stay up past midnight. Sorry friends. I was that parent this party. Whoops.

In addition to the main food table, I wanted a "concessions stand" for the movie. That was set up in the kitchen & consisted of popcorn, cracker jacks, chips & candy.

I made the concessions stand a "Wandering Oaken's Trading Post" concession stand, to symbolize where Anna met Kristoff on her way to look for Elsa.

This was the plate/napkin table & wall where we had Addy's pictures from the past year.

For favors, we had Frozen cups with the usual party favors...pencils, crayons, stickers, tattoos, etc. We also used a Frozen book as the guestbook.

Click Below for More Info on This Party
Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday
Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday Decorations
Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday Food
Movie Clapboard for Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday
Marquee Sign for Addy's 4th Frozenfest Birthday

Super Bowl - Football Party Decorations

So for the party decorations for the Super Bowl Party, I started with the scoreboard. For the board, I used the back of the Guinness/Harp board that I used for Steve's Beer & Bacon birthday party. I painted it with chalkboard paint. I then cut out letters for the board. I also cut out the mascots for the two teams & then drew on the boxes for the score & time in chalk.

This is horrible lighting, but here is the board in progress.

I used a faux grass tablecloth & hung it up on the wall & used another green table cloth with lines representing the marks on the football field.

I used football trays & bowls that I have collected from the Dollar Tree.

I also made some goalposts. I made them from pipes from Lowes & then spray painted them yellow. I stuck the pipes into square pieces of Styrofoam that can be used for take flowers & stuff.

For the cupcake bleachers, I used spice racks from my pantry. They are just plain & plastic, but the cupcakes covered them up, so they worked out just fine.

The cupcake wrappers & toppers came from a great website, printabletreats.com. They had all these great printables for NFL teams. That's where I printed the toppers, wrappers & logos from. A great resource for great parties! I got a lot of the bowls from Dollar Tree & then I got the plates from Party City.

Click below for more info on this party...
Super Bowl Main Party Page
Super Bowl Decorations Page
Football Bacon Cheeseball
Oreo Chocolate Chunk Cheeseball
Fruit Sugar Cookie Tarts
Football cake & brownies

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Football Bacon Cheeseball

So you guys know I love a cheeseball. I have a whole page dedicated to cheeseballs. You also probably know from my husband's beer & bacon birthday party one year, that he loves bacon. This Super Bowl party was the perfect opportunity to combine the two. So easy & so delicious.

I started with a block of cream cheese & added in half of a chopped onion.

I threw in some chopped bacon.

Then I added in some Italian Style cheese mix & some seasonings. For seasonings, I used Weber's gourmet burger seasoning, garlic salt & some minced onion. I mixed it all together & shaped it into a football.

Then I covered it in...you guessed it...more bacon. Then a couple of slices of provolone cheese for the football laces. I served it with some club crackers & it was pretty tasty.

Oreo Chocolate Chunk Cheeseball

For the Super Bowl party, I decided to take on a different spin from my usual cheeseball & make something sweet. I started with a bunch of Oreos. I took the icing out of the oreos & put the oreo part aside for the outside crumble & threw the icing part in with a bunch of other crushed oreos. I separated a row of the Oreo pack this way & then crushed up the remaining two rows with a potato masher.

I added in a block of cream cheese. I had a lot of random baking chips around my house for some reason, so I threw in regular chocolate chips, some shaved dark chocolate & some white chocolate chips.

I used a mixer to mix it all in. It was a little think, so I threw in a splash of milk, just to get it going.

After it was a good consistency, I shaped it into a football shape.

Then I just covered it in the Oreo cookie crumbs. As you can see here, I am so not neat when it comes to icing, which is why my friend Ally typically handles this kind of stuff. But she had her hands full with the strawberries, so I did the icing...hence why it is terrible. It was quite delicious though. I served the Oreo Cheeseball with graham crackers & vanilla wafers. Delicious.

Pizza Pocket Footballs

Pizza is my absolute favorite food. I would eat it every day if I could (full disclosure, I probably did do that in high school & college, ha. It wasn't pretty.) So I wanted to make little pizza pockets for the party. Super easy Super Bowl food.

Start with pizza crust.

I used the football cookie cutter shape to cut out pieces of pizza crust.

I added some pizza sauce & mozzarella. I added pepperoni to some & left some plain.

I put another football shaped pizza crust cutout on top, pinched the sides together & baked for about 10 minutes on 375.

I'm not sure they actually look like footballs, but they were sort of the shape & they were delicious, so all is well that ends well, right? ; )

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Thursday, October 6, 2016

Wednesday, October 5, 2016