Just me & 10 girls under the sea.  I did some craftiness, some things worked better than others. What didn’t work/what I learned:

To do that “use plastic table cloths in place of streamers” thing I showed in my last pinterest post is VERY cool… only if you have the right size of space. Mine? Didn’t work. Wrong size room, too high ceilings in one, too narrow for 1/2 a table cloth but too long for a full… So! Streamers it was.

The blue jello with fish candy in it was a big hit. I did it in tiny plastic cups (disposable “appetizer” cups from party store). ONE PROBLEM: Don’t put candy fish in the jello when you make the jello, or even any significant amount of time before you serve. Jello needs to be set (or fish just sink to bottom and look, well, dead). Also? Too long in the jell0 and the fish.. well… they start to dissolve into it. and the texture + color is GROSS!!! Like decaying fish. SO… yeah. A lot of girls didn’t actually eat them and I ended up throwing out left overs. *gag*

Things that did work:

Using the Duff spray (Duff as in guy from Ace of Cakes on Food Network – he has his own line at Michael’s of decorating supplies) on cupcakes = awesome. It basically is food coloring spray paint – and i LOVE the look.

I set out stickers and crafty bits down the center of the table – as you might confetti and such. Then I set a chipboard heart at each spot (which I’d painted blue + misted with sparkly silver mist). It also had 2 holes punched in it and a wire tie thing (what do you call those? pipe cleaners? they’re in kid craft area…) so that when finished the girls could put them up on their walls. Above you see E using a Copic. I never use mine and I have blue + green ones so I let them have at ‘em. No Copic was harmed.

Mason Jar as drink = fab. NO SPILLS. I punched a trio of holes to make room for the straw (Fyi: crop a dile big bite WORKS ON MASON JAR LIDS!) I added another hole for the umbrella, and filled with each girl’s choice of drink.

Dessert bar a hit. I cut rice crispy treats (that had blue sprinkles in them) into star shapes (aka sea stars), had a big starfish shaped bowl full of sea-themed candy like life savers, gummy fish, swedish fish, gummy sharks, gummy clown fish; and then I had the cupcakes of course. It was NOT a free-for-all. Things got passed out, choices made, and baggie ‘o candy went home with each girl for later. (they just got to pick A candy. I wasn’t gonna amp them up any more than they were!)

I spent a lot of time on streamers and decorations – not that it took long to take down. I was happy to. I’m sure we’ll have many birthday and other parties in years to come, but kids are only little for a few precious years. There is a very narrow window of time, a very set number of years where they’re old enough to have theme parties like this, but not too old that they don’t want hoopla.

I am doing my best to make each one count, and to have fun with the preparations and detail. Know what? It’s really satisfying and fun – and I’m glad that it turned out as fun as she’d hoped.

Today ends my rookie season as team soccer mom [oh, and Elizabeth's as a soccer team rookie!] with a pizza party and awards for the girls. It was the coach’s idea to give them a photo (Framed), and this is what I came up with:

In Photoshop Elements I edited each photo. I sized it to 4×6 and “reverse black & white” tooled the photo which means I selected the girl + soccer ball, then de-saturated the color on the rest of the photo to about 30-40%. This made the girl pop - and really become the star!

Then I opened a new 5×7 document and drew a bunch of scratchy lines all over the file background (with brushes). Then I added the photo (4×6), added a ‘scratched edges’ .png that would add grunge around the layers, and added a drop shadow to help that picture “pop” from it’s mat. Finally I used a Varsity font to write out the girl’s name. To add pop to that – I just used my paint bucket tool to add green to the previously transparent thin outline around the letters.

Re-creating for each girl was easy – just the photo + text had to be redone. The other layers I left exactly as-is in that 5×7 document. The hardest part? Searching through photos from 10 games to find a good action shot of each girl – facing me. That took a LONG time.

I had visions of adding their number, maybe decking out that plain black frame more… but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I like it simple. and really – sometimes simple IS best. My work here is done, and it was fun to use my digital scrapbook skills for good in my motherly duties.

I’m retiring my soccer mom chair and being totally ok with my Wednesdays and Saturdays being freed up. For now…