Horse Party Invitations

 I've managed to find a little breathing room this week in among work, keeping up with the house and all the moving preparations.  October is fast approaching and with it comes Birthday Month in our families - there are at least 10 that we actively celebrate with close family and friends and several others that I acknowledge with at least a note all within about 18 days between the end of September and the middle of October.  It's intense.  So I took advantage of some extra time this week and dug into the actual party prep for my daugher's birthday.
I thought I would go ahead and share the invitations I finished yesterday.  (I'm always so excited when I finish things, you know?!)  The last few years I have been leaning more toward the digitally designed invitations so I could just get one all laid out and print out as many as I needed.  This year Kaitlyn wants another slumber party and I limit the guests to only three so I decided to make them a little more "scrapbook-y" and three dimensional.  She was very quick to select horses as her theme this year and a few weeks back she sat down with me and we looked at all kind of ideas on Pinterest.  It was a lot of fun.  In the process we narrowed her theme down even further to a western/cowgirl style in pink and brown and that was all I needed to set myself off an running.

 I'm all about using what I have right now and I was happy to find this great chocolate brown and two tone pink polka dot paper in my stash so I used that for the background.  I then proceeded to find some fun western fonts and a font of horse dingbats that I was able to use for the horse silhouette (and will be repeated in most of the other printables/decor for the party).  The rest of it just kind of flowed from there.

The invite reads:

Wanted

your presence at

Kaitlyn's 11th Birthday

so put on your boots and mosey on over for a 

Slumber Party

The Caldwell Homestead

(address)

The shindig begins at 6:00 PM and you can round up your cowgirls at 10:00AM Saturday
(date)

Give a Holler:  Alayna (phone number)

Don't forget your bedroll!

I printed that onto cardstock then tore along all the edges and inked them to give it a weathered/distressed look.  Then finished it off with a pink ribbon and the horse silhouette which I had mounted with foam tape to give it some dimension,

Kaitlyn is very happy with the invitations and I'm starting to get kind of excited for the party myself.  Four more weeks to go...


Linking to:
DIY Projects and Receipes with the Party Bunch

Slumber Party - Grown Up Style

My mom's best friend (and the kids' honorary grandma) just turned 60. My mom, of course, wanted to do something special for her and when she asked for my input the first thing that popped into my head was "slumber party!" :) I admit, there are parts of me that long for those long ago nights of girl talk and junk food. So that's exactly what we did.

The Decor:
-have you seen this table idea? It's making the rounds in blog land, at least on the party circuit and I think it's totally cute - make the table look like a bed by adding a pillow at one end. Simple and effective - right up my alley. We kept the rest of the tablescape pretty simple because we were doing fondu for dinner and didn't want a lot of stuff in the way.
-downstairs we set up our munchies. We had caramel corn and regular popcorn too.
-and a "just for fun" table to help set the mood, with games, movies, and the matching sets of pjs that we used for party favors. (side note - those tissue paper pom poms did not turn out anything like they did on Martha Stewart's site. ugh)

The Party:
-as I said, dinner was cheese fondue and strawberry salad (lettuce, craisins, strawberries, candied pecans and raspberry viniagrette dressing)
-dessert was a raspberry cream thing (no name because Mom got the recipe from a friend who had served it at Bunco) - very light and yummy. It has a graham cracker crust and the filling is mini marshmallows, melted with a bit of milk then mixed with whipped cream (unsweetened) and raspberries.
-we then went downstairs, changed into our party pjs, then sat around talking and doing each other's hair. We also had supplies for manicures and a ton of game options but in the end we just decided to watch a movie. That took us until midnight and at that we were all ready to turn in. (I had sent my dad to my house with the kids and needed to relieve him anyway. Good thing I hadn't left him alone with them all night because I found him sitting up with my little one who was all stuffed up. So I spent another half hour getting him all set up to sleep better)
(mint truffles on the pillows, of course)
-First thing this morning, the kids and I headed back over to my mom's house for breakfast - strawberry/banana crepes MMMMMM.

Know what I'm doing today? NAPPING! :)

Linking to: Weekend Wrap Up Party (Tatertots and Jello)