February is officially party month in the McGrory-Patton household, with both Bella's and Lily's birthdays as well as the majority of Bella's friends. Which makes it a fun month, but a potentially expensive one. So this year I decided to through a simple tea party for Bella's birthday (although I have to admit that she also had a bigger party at a play center a few days after) with jam sandwiches and jelly and ice cream amongst other goodies.
In preparation for the party I dragged my cold and tired body (and Lily's, bless her) out of bed to a car boot sale early the sunday before and bought a 20 piece vintage tea set for a couple of pounds, knowing that if anything got broken it wouldn't matter (it's not pretty enough for me to have normally bought it, but I knew Bella would like it) and I already had the linens and the cake plates.
To decorate I used the birthday banner that I've used every year for Bella and I had been desperate to try making these since first seeing them, so I spent a good couple of hours in front of Dr. Who making huge puffy flowers (you should make these even if you don't need them, they're so cool), which we just cellotaped to the ceiling (I'm going to hang them in the girls room after Lily's party).
To keep it all looking like a proper tea party we filled the tea pot with Apple juice and cut the sandwiches out with princess cookie cutters and filled cut glass sweetie bowls with grapes and strawberries.
For the party favours I wanted to do something that wouldn't immediately be thrown away (totally agree with this sentiment), so I bought 5 plain white mini tea cups from Ikea - I wanted vintage tea cups but didn't have time to search for them, and also realised that some of my friends wouldn't get the whole vintage thing and would actually prefer new Ikea mugs. Which I filled with shredded tissue paper, jelly love hearts, jelly bellys and lip balm, placed it in a cellophane bag, and tied it with pink ribbon (and then didn't take a photo!).
It was a lovely tea party, but I have to admit that my favourite part was when I walked in to the front room to find them all watching Star Wars with Bella dressed in her Princess Leia costume and excitedly explaining to everyone that Luke and Leia were actually brother and sister and that Darth Vader was their father.
Oh and just in case you make the mistake of thinking that nothing goes wrong - the party favours were supposed to include hair clips with fabric covered buttons, but I just could. not. make them and after many glue gun attempts and pinging off of buttons I gave up. So then I decided to use a mini silicon heart shaped cookie tray to make mini heart shaped crayons, only to discover when it was far too late that the mini heart shaped cookie tray was actually a mini heart shaped ice cube tray. And had therefore melted, along with the broken crayons. So then I decided (oh and all of this happened the night before the party, because apparently a year is just not long enough to prepare for Bella's birthday) that I would make monogrammed hankies for all the girls. At 1am.
Not.
So jelly hearts, jelly bellys and lipbalm. Good enough.
