Pleased as Punch party planning and crafting

I have loved Valentine's Day for as long as I can remember. I remember waking up early to decorate the box I'd put on my desk to collect valentines from classmates. Getting to stop doing classwork and just have a party was the best thing ever. Pink and red and glitter and hearts and kisses? These are my favorite things. When I was in junior high and high school my dad brought my sisters and me flowers we got to carry around at school. More recently I have made an effort to bring flowers or a little flowering plant to all of my coworkers on Valentine's Day. Spreading my joy of this holiday makes me happy. This wreath is a quick and inexpensive way to bring a little Valentine's Day joy to your home. All you need: metal wreath form (available at Dollar Tree) crepe paper ribbon glue hot glue I made two sizes of crepe paper rosettes, the larger in the darker pink, the smaller in the lighter pink. For the larger ones I tore a strip of crep...

So, so fun. One of my favorite movies sparked so many ideas for delightful party details. I am planning to create another The Goonies themed party later this year, and I am looking forward to using some of these techniques and crafting some things I wasn't able to do last time. The invitations: I chose a heavy textured paper, folded it in half and cut it in two. I had some thin foam sheets, which I cut into strips the same width as the red ribbon I purchased. I cut out and glued a little piece of paper colored silver to finish off the "suspenders" and give some fun dimension to the front of the invitations. The Superman logo and famous "Hey you guys!" quote in a Goonies font finished off the look. For the back of the invitation I printed out the treasure map. For some reason I only have a picture of the prototype and not the completed invitation, which is such a shame. This is fun, but it looked AMAZING when it was finished. The actual completed ...

I had such a fun time brainstorming for this party. Figuring out what we should create for the actual reveal was so much harder than we expected, because we loved so many of the options we had come up with. (I think the runner up was a puppet popping out from a warp pipe, done with hydraulics.) The male/female pairing in Super Mario Bros is Mario and Princess Peach, but their colors of red and pink weren't different enough for the color scheme I wanted (and I've always liked Luigi better), so we decided on green and pink. I had some brick fabric on hand, so I cut a large strip and sketched out a question block. (You could print out an image of the question mark and use it as a stencil. I hand-sketched, but a stencil would have made it so much easier.) I let it dry and went over it again, probably about three layers of each color. The nice thing is it is just yellow, white and black. Easy peasy. My delightful husband took the initiative to use up s...

Hey, my name is Susannah. I love to plan and craft parties. There are many, many party planning sites out there, so what makes me different? I don't strive for perfection. My goal isn't to have a flawless Pinterest dessert table. I want to do things a little differently. I want to have fun and make people smile. I want emotional accessibility! I want someone to see a party idea or craft and not feel intimidated and to realize they can totally do it, too! (A few years ago I found these long rectangular boxes and realized they'd be perfect for the outdoor Super Mario Bros birthday party I was throwing. I taped off the center and spray painted it yellow, let that dry, then covered that while I spray painted the rest of the box. Craft paint filled in the other details of the brick and question blocks.)