Panda Birthday Party...On a budget

I would say my sister's panda birthday party went well this past Saturday. Although I ended up doing most....actually all the decorating, I still think it looked good considering I had a toddler after me the entire time. We also managed to keep things on a pretty low budget. It was hard to calculate everything as some of the supplies I bought for the party were used for other things but I'd say we were around $100 for everything, including food.

The first thing on the agenda were the invitations. These were made strictly from things I had in my craft supplies. I had some empty envelopes and poster board that I cut to fit into the envelopes. Then I used some green felt as the backdrop and cut circles out of white felt to make the panda face. I didn't have black felt so I just painted some of the white circles with black paint. Then we printed out the details and glued them to the back of the invite as you can see above. I think they turned out pretty cute....especially considering we spent no money making them.

Then there's the panda cake. It doesn't look exactly like the picture from my last post but I think it looks pretty good considering this was my first attempt. I just used two box mixes. The first I made in a round cake pan to make the head and the second I made in a 9x13 baking dish. I cut out the ears and nose circles from the cake made in the pan and put it together. I couldn't find black food coloring so I used vanilla frosting for most of it them used chocolate sprinkles to make the black portions and a tube of black decorating icing to make the mouth and outline the eyes.

I also used the vanilla frosting and black icing to decorate some sugar cookies.

Below are pictures of some of the decorations. We went with a black and white theme and a pop of lime green that came about from the invitations.

I also made panda ear headbands for all the girls to wear. I didn't make the ears permanent so each girl was able to take off the ears and use the headband on its own. I just cut out strips of white felt that I had and some ear shapes out of black poster board that I bought to decorate with. I attached the ears to the felt with a glue gun and the felt to the headband using double-sided tape.

And of course Audrey also had a pair =)
Favors can get very expensive at birthday parties so I decided to combine the favor and an activity in one. I bought these plain canvas bags at my crafts store ( under $2 each) and bought some decorations as well as used things I had around and added some paint and paint brushes. The girls really enjoyed this. They also received a small bag of candy to place in their newly decorated totes.

My sister was very happy with the outcome of the day so my job was complete. I guess I need to start getting used to planning parties on a budget as Audrey is getting older and I am getting no richer =)