Barbie Birthday Bash

To celebrate my daughter’s 8th birthday, we had a Barbie-themed party yesterday. It was so much fun! And, because I love hand-made, there were a lot of hand-made touches to the party!

First of all, I made these invitations. I found the image of a vintage Barbie silhouette online, and then I enlarged it and put the words on top of the image using a text box and white lettering. I’m sure there was an easier way, but my computer illiteracy could only take me so far…. I printed two to a page, and then I cut them all out with an exacto-knife. At that point, I was really, really, really wishing that I would win a Sihouette or Cricut giveaway somewhere in blog-land….We glued the silhouettes to pretty scrapbook paper, hole-punched for her hair bow, and then I tied a ribbon through the holes to finish them up. I liked the way they turned out! (I blurred out the personal info, in case you’re taking a closer look to read the words…)

Next, I made these pink dresses as party favors. As each girl arrived, we gave her a dress for her Barbie. They were a hit, I think! Thanks to Jessica, from Craftiness is Not Optional for the great dress tutorial. Her Barbie tutorials are fabulous! I used fabric scraps from the Glenda dress I made my daughter for Halloween. Thrifty, eh? 🙂

We encouraged the girls coming to bring their favorite Barbie stuff, and we set up a “Barbie village” in the living room with 3 Barbie houses, horses, cars, a “beach” and vacation area across the room, etc. They had a great time playing together, and it made me smile to see all the pink dresses romping around Barbie-land.

Next, my dear friend Kelley made this cake. I was actually supposed to make it, with her teaching and guiding me, but at the very beginning we ran into trouble, and I was happy to have her just take charge and do the best she could with a precarious cake. I love how it turned out. We had read online to bake the cake mix in a Pampered Chef batter bowl to make the skirt shape, but it turned out that one cake mix filled only about half the bowl, and when we inverted it onto the platter, the top of the skirt came only up to Barbie’s knees. Well, I had made cupcakes too, for our family party later, so we decided to use cupcakes under the batter bowl cake, to give it more height. It wasn’t a very firm foundation, and it kept the skirt from being perfectly smooth, but it did the trick and saved us! I think Kelley did a great job rescuing the cake and making it work!

In a previous post I showed you the shirt I made my daughter using freezer paper stencils.

Besides playing with Barbies and eating snacks and cake, the girls also colored Barbie coloring pages and played a memory game using the plate of Barbie stuff in the picture above. They had to try to remember everything on the plate and write the items down. The girl who remembered the most items won a prize.

It was a great party, and I think the homemade touches are the memories that will stick with my daughter and me.