Here's the entire kitchen set up. I was going to decorate the entire house in this motif, but I ran out of time. Good thing I didn't, though, because only one other family and one friend showed up. Anyway, the bunting is based off of American maritime signal flags, since this was a ocean/water themed birthday.
I used plain construction paper, tape, hot glue, and twine. Every square was 9x9 inches. I secured the flags to a piece of white paper folded over the twine, then hot glued them in place so they wouldn't slide all over. The flags spell out her name, which I thought was pretty clever, if I do say so myself.
The pom poms were made out of tissue paper. Several layers of tissue paper were placed on top of each other, then folded up in a fan configuration. I folded them in half, then tied a string or ribbon around the middle. Then you just open up the fan and separate the layers to get it to "puff."
Of course my desserts and snack table was inspired by Pinterest. My table was way too big to make it look "full" of stuff, like most other dessert tables, but there was plenty left over (almost all of it). I bought the pails, utensils and napkins, and all of the serving trays from the dollar store. The little "fish bowl" was full of graham cracker sand and sea animal-shaped fruit snack. Originally it was going to be a guessing game, and whoever guessed the closest would win the whole thing. (There were 115 fruit snack, by the way.)
I procrastinated really bad and didn't do the cookies until the last minute.
I had planned on piping the royal icing border just right and flooding the inside, but I didn't get to them until the last half hour before the party was supposed to start. Instead I roughly piped anchors onto the cookies and flooded them. Admittedly, they do look like anchors, but they're just not as pretty and precise as I would've liked them to be.
I consider myself a hobbyist cake artist, so her cake was the focal point of the table. Most nautical cakes have anchors or boats on them, and ocean cakes usually have waves, the usual sea life (fish, octopi, sea turtles, etc.), and/or sea shells. I wanted her cake to be different and unique, and she already had a super cute birthday outfit with baby seal on them.
The baby seals wore swimming caps, so I knew I had to integrate that into the cake. The bottom tier has the baby seals (one is cut-off, I know. She was supposed to be coming out of the water), and the top tier represents the swimming caps full of flowers.
These marshmallow pops were inspired by this pin. I didn't think cheese Goldfish really went well with delicious marshmallows, so I used s'mores Goldfish instead. In my opinion, it tasted much better than it would have with the cheese.
She wanted to get her hands on that cake so bad.
I made the photo booth in the spare area in our living room. I simply folded a dollar store table cloth in half and put it up with duct tape. The store also had construction paper sea animals which I taped to the tablecloth. The "waves" were made with blue streamers taped from top to bottom. It was really cute, and I wish I had gotten a picture of the whole thing. Kali wouldn't sit still enough to get a good picture of her in front of it.
Overall, it was a cute party, and instead of a formal party, we all just hung out while the kids played outside. I shouldn't have stressed so much over such a small party, but I thought more people would show up. Either way, I loved doing it because I got some good pictures, and I'm sure Kali will appreciate it in the future. I will definitely hold off on doing a big party again until we're back home and more people, including family, can attend. Oh, the fun life of being a military family.
I hope I inspired you to go just a little crazy for your kids' birthday. Even a small party can look amazing, especially on a tight budget.
UPDATE: I was able to set up the photo booth again, so I got a decent picture of it.
