A Lego Party

My son and daughter LOVE Legos. So this year we decided to throw them a Lego birthday party!

I found a ton of ideas on Pinterest, but I knew right off the bat that I didn't want to spend too much time on this.
After looking at the myriad of ideas, I tried to pick out the ones that I thought might take less time to work on.

First came the invitations.
I used this template from here and put in our own birthday party information.



Next I worked on the decorations.
I didn't want to waste printer ink, so I made a lego banner based on a template from here using cardstock, glue, yarn, clothespins, and wall-mounting hooks.

Next, I worked on table decorations.

I made a Lego boy and a Lego girl to display my kids' names and ages based on this picture. However, the link wasn't working for me, so I made my own cut outs, using card-stock and glue. These stayed up great indoors, but not so much outdoors. I ended up taping them up after repeated falls.

I had the kids build utensil holders out of legos (I got the idea from Pinterest of course.).

I also drew faces on yellow paper cups that I bought from the dollar store to add to the Lego decor. (I got the idea from here.)

Lego activities and games are always fun, so we did three simple ones:

Guess how many Lego pieces there are (Again, the idea is from Pinterest),

Pin the head on the Lego man (from Pinterest) - a hit with the kids,

and Lego masks.

I used this template and pasted it into Microsoft Word. I wanted to turn this into a craft so I erased the eyebrows and mouth in Microsoft Word and printed the masks out onto yellow file folders (I found cardstock to be too flimsy.)
I cut out the eyes so the kids could see and set out elastic string to tie on at the end.
To make this a craft, I set out 4 different types of eyebrows (that I cut out beforehand), furry moustaches (from the dollar store), and permanent markers to draw mouths.
Some of the girls drew red mouths and added eyelashes to the eyes to create a girl lego mask.

The masks made for a great group photo!

We completed the day with cupcakes topped with lego candy of course!

(We bought the candy from Toys r us, but they are also available on www.amazon.com.)

Each guest left with a favor bag (based on this), which consisted of lego mini-figure crayons and a mini lego coloring book.

Here is my post on how to assemble these favor bags.
My kids helped peel and break the crayons to make the lego crayons, and I used the same template that we used for the invitations to seal the bags. However, I erased the words and the lego figure and typed in "Thank you for coming" instead.

The kids had a ton of fun and so did I!

Painting Vases with Chalk Paint

I have so many vases lying around our home not being put to use that I decided to paint some of them.

I began by washing the vase.
Once it was dry, I painted the inside of the vase with Provence chalk paint.
(I wrote about Annie Sloan chalk paint in this post.)

After the paint dried, I painted a second coat.

Throw in some flowers and there you have it!

Another Chalk Paint Project

In my last post, I blogged about Annie Sloan Chalk paint.

Well, I loved using chalk paint so much that I decided to paint an end table that someone gave to me in college.

The transformation after using Provence chalk paint:

I began by sanding everything down with a 220 grit sanding block. With chalk paint, it isn't necessary to sand down or even prime before applying paint, but I ended up sanding anyway because this piece of furniture was particularly scratched up.

I then spray painted with Rust-Oleum metallic spray paint to create a distressed look. I only spray painted the edges as these were the areas where I wanted the metallic paint to show.

Once this dried, I applied a coat of Provence chalk paint to most of the furniture using a Purdy 2.5 inch brush. I left some of the spray-painted parts unpainted to make sure it'll show. I also sanded down the edges where I wanted to create the distressed look.

At this point, I could have been finished with the chalk paint. However, since I only wanted to create a subtle distressed look, I painted a second coat, again avoiding some of the spray-painted parts to show. I sanded down the edges again to have the metallic color pop out.

After everything was dry, I applied a coat of Annie Sloan clear wax, making sure I wiped off any excess wax as I went along.

I love this color and the character it adds to our living room!