Our dear daughter chose a butterfly theme for her 7th birthday bash. She invited only the girls from her class, so we were able to have the party at our home. Once she came up with the theme, I went to work finding all sorts of butterfly stickers, coloring pages, crafts and decorations.I absolutely love how the cake turned out. I used two 9 inch round cake pans to bake a vanilla cake. I put a layer of icing over the first cake, then put the second on top before cutting it down the middle. It's much easier to icing a round cake than it is to do two halves and smush them together. I also put the icing around the rounded sides before I placed the cakes together in the shape of a butterfly. Then I just had to cut out some of the outer wings to shape them, and then finish putting icing on the rest. While the icing was still soft, the boys had fun lining up marshmallows in a pattern across the top and around the bottom. The butterfly body was a yellow Starburst candy that I softened in the microwave so that I could roll it into shape. Then we used pink Starburst candies (also softened) to make the antennae.
As the party began, the girls went to the kitchen table and wrote birthday messages on a large piece of paper. This kept them busy for a few minutes until everyone arrived.
Then it was time for arts and crafts. I had collected various pipe cleaners, pompoms, stickers, etc for them to make foam butterflies. All of these pieces were picked up at the dollar store, so this craft was about $4 for 12 projects. I also printed out a butterfly word search (found online), and we had butterfly tattoos they could put on their arms, hands or cheeks.
I picked up sun catchers at Michael's so they worked on those for a bit too. They were much harder than I thought, as they would bump each other an then one little bead would go under the frame and shift everything off, forcing them to start over. After about 45 minutes of working on the sun catchers, and still not done, the girls took off to my daughter's bedroom to play. Not about to let the project go to waste, my husband and I sat at the table and frantically worked to finish up the girls' projects.
 |
| my savior |
Putting together the food was fun also, as we arranged cheese, pepperoni and butterfly shaped crackers on a tray. Another tray held pineapples, grapes, strawberries and cantaloupe in the shape of a butterfly. And then dinner was a pasta station, where the girls could assemble the meal however they'd like with butterfly shaped pasta, meatballs, sauce, butter and grated Parmesan cheese.
