Longtime readers will know that I have an irrational love of flinging things on the floor and hanging crap from the ceilings. It’s part of what makes me … me.
I’ve promised to be better about providing details on the festivities I throw for the kids so people can get ideas. So here’s the breakdown on how Sunbeam and I pulled off the Fairy Tea.
We started at Oriental Trading Company. A warning that this website is impossible to navigate — but the stuff is incredible, generally quite cheap, and I troll for sales. In May I caught one and bought plain white fairy wings at a cost of $2 apiece and little green fairy skirts at $5 a dozen. I can’t find them on the site any more, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. (As I said, hard to navigate).
I also bought glittery wands($9 per dozen) and crowns ($12 per dozen).
Sunbeam spray-painted the wings — pink on top, purple on the bottom, with a coat of glitter after. The paint cost about $10 bucks, total, and we painted only one side of each.
Next, we hit Michael’s. There, we bought jewels, and glitter foam stickers, and sticky dots ($20, total). Sticky dots are an invention of genuis. They come in rolls of 100. You put a jewel on the dot, peel, and the sticky dot is adhered. Then you stick the jewel on something and it’s stuck. It’s not as good has hot glue, but it’s extremely close and even little kids can do it unsupervised. We cut the roll into strips of ten. We put the jewels and foam glitter stickers in bowls. Decorating their wings took up aout 45 minutes of time.
After an inappropriate amount of angst over what to do with the three boys in attendance, we made capes. I bought three yards of a wide drapey royal blue fabric, and three yards of gold cord. Sunbeam used seam tape to fold the top of the fabric over the cable and … voila. Capes.
We added foam swords, and the boys were able to decorate both to heart’s content. Total cost was about $13.
Next, Sunbeam had baked a batch of sugar cookies. The mix cost about $3 and made 2 dozen. She cut the cookies in flower shapes. She bought sprinkles ($4 worth) two tubs of white frosting at $2 apiece and scooped it into little bowls, coloring each with food coloring. The kids spread frosting on the cookies with popscicle sticks, and then shook sprinkles on them. Then they ate them. They liked that part. That took about 30 minutes.
We greeted the kids at the door with name-tags and a sharpie pen. Each child was asked to pick her fairy name. (The boys, to a man, refused.) I was ready to coach them, but I didn’t need to. We had Fairy Nature (Mare); Renny Nature (Ren, who refused to do anything else): Fairy Rainbow, Fairy Jewel, and Sparkle, among others. We called the kids by those names, which made it great for anyone helping out who didn’t know the kids.
Last, our original plan was for an Enchanted Frog Pond, a tradition we began last year by filling an old wading pond with sand and water. (Sand from the sandbox, water from the hose= free. A large bag of sand would be about $10 bucks.) Then I dumped cool trinkets in it. Stuff I collected over months. Leftover Easter favors. Stretchy bugs, shells, stones, pirate coins, plastic rings, necklaces, dinosaurs … whatever I came across that was cheap. At an outdoor party, the Enchanted Frog Pond is a blast. Each child is given a bag to fill, and they have to dig through water and sand to find interesting things. They love it, and it can take each kid 30 minutes to choose what to put in the bag. (The bags I got were small wedding favor bags for about $5 a dozen.)
But we had moved the party indoors, and the question of What to Do About the Enchanted Pond was troubling.
Sunbeam begged me not to try even the sand part in doors, and I caved, in large part because I know she’d feel compelled to vacuum it when it spilled and I left it for weeks until it made her crazy. And only one of us is allowed to be crazy at a time, and mostly I prefer it’s me. So no sand.
We considered packing peanuts, but I thought they would be too light, and expensive. I dug through the Sacred Closet Under the Stairs and came across … four unused bags of Easter basket grass. In three colors. Hmm … I added other random crap from the Closet including satin flowers, string, random ribbon, and a stray bag of pipe cleaners, all twisted up. We tossed it into a big plastic bin. (Okay, here, I admit I threw glitter and confetti in there, too. Hey, it’s me.) We threw the goodies in there and tossed it around and it was good to go.
It’s hard to estimate the total cost of it, but I think you could pull it off very nicely for about $10, minus sand or Easter grass.
Then Sunbeam led a spectacular game of freeze dance, while the other moms and I cleared the tables and set it out for cake. I had bought a damaged ceramic tea pot at Christmas Tree Shop for $2. A sugar and creamer to match for $5. Sunbeam brought her mother’s silver tea set, so between us, we had two sets.
I also bought disposable handled plastic coffee cups. I bought flower stickers and covered the cups and the tea set with them. (About $10 for all of it.)
I made the tea by pouring very hot tap water into the pots and then putting three vanilla tea bags in each one. I kept lemonade on standby, and most of the kids preferred that.
The adults poured the tea and helped the kids pour their own cream. We used sugar cubes and they loved that. We served it with sandwiches and cake.
We decorated the house with crepe paper ($5) and helium balloons ($12) in pink, purple, and green.
The total cost for the party for 17 children was $130, not counting food. (Normally, I make my own, but this year with grad school there was no way, so I bought cake and tea sandwiches.) I start thinking about the party about four months out, picking things up as I see them, which spreads the expense out.
