Planning for a Snoopy Birthday Party

As I'm writing this, Summer's birthday has already come and gone but I wanted to post about the planning of her party just incase there is anyone out there googling for ideas and can use something here.  I personally used google nonstop to try to find Snoopy party decorations and supplies (cups, plates, napkins, balloons, etc) and could find nothing!  I understand though, Snoopy and the Peanuts gang aren't all that popular anymore.  Before I get into party planning though, let me tell the story of how Snoopy came into our lives.

One December day in 2011, my husband and I were out trying to have a much needed date night.  Sweet friends offered to babysit for us, I think at the time I hadn't left Summer with anyone yet and so while the hubs and I are out trying to have a good time, all I can think about is my baby.  I missed her and wanted to go buy her something for Christmas so while we were walking around the mall, I drug hubby into the super packed Hallmark store.  I was not intentionally looking for anything Snoopy or Peanuts related since I've never had a particular interest in any of them (other than loving and watching the yearly classics on TV at Halloween and Christmas) but a rack of cute Snoopys caught my eye.  I picked up the softest one (no, he is no longer soft, just ratty) and decided I had to have it for Summer.  It was the only one in the store and I even made my husband run out of the mall and to our car because I had a Hallmark coupon in there while I waited in an insanely long checkout line.  I bought the Snoopy and Summer and Snoopy have been best friends ever since.

Having a Snoopy themed birthday was a no brainer the only problem was, there are basically no decorations for a Snoopy party to be found anywhere.  I scoured pinterest and google and couldn't find much of anything so I ended up just making everything myself.  I'm going to detail it below, if anyone out there in internetland is interested in any of the templates that I have for the cups, water bottles or any of the other ideas, feel free to email me at vickipinson@msn.com.

Invitations.  I used an image of  Snoopy on his doghouse (free on the internet) and just copied and pasted into Word and added my own text.  Printed onto cardstock ($3.99 at Hobby Lobby plus 40%), cut it out, traced onto poster board ($.50 at the Dollarstore) and glued the poster cut out onto the back of the cardstock card.  Very simple.

Water bottles. I bought a pack of Nestle water bottles, removed the labels and printed my own design onto clear paper (I don't know what the paper is called but it's $.59/each at Hobby Lobby in the scrap book paper isle plus 40% off).  1 sheet of paper will print out 6 labels.  Then I used rubber glue to glue it on the water bottles.

Paper cups.  Figuring out what to do about cups was really frustrating for me. For Summer's birthday last year I bought a bunch of canned drinks but I wanted to keep my budget low this year so I only wanted water and tea, no expensive variety drinks, but I didn't want plain cups, they needed to be cute.  At first I was thinking of printing out a bunch of different Snoopy images and just gluing them on but I didn't like the way it looked. I wanted something that looked like it was printed onto the cup so here is where the clear paper came in handy again. Now, for some reason trying to create a cup template was super difficult for me, it took a lot of trial and error and mess ups before I was able to get the lengths, widths and curves right, maybe someone good in math could've figured it out better and quicker than me.  At any rate, I bought plain white 9oz. paper cups from the Dollar Store (one pack has 12 cups), printed my cup design and used rubber glue to glue on my cups.

Table and Tablecloth.  I recently made Summer some ruffle curtains  for her bedroom and thought that it might be cute to use the same concept to make a tablecloth.  With the curtains I hand stitched them all, one ruffle at a time (I don't have a sewing machine and wouldn't know how to use it even if I did.  Lessons please!!!?)  That took way too long so for the tablecloth I was super lazy.  I bought a $4 plain white bed sheet from WalMart, cut out one long strip that would fit around the rims of the table down to the floor then I ripped the rest of the sheet into strips and used stitch witch and an iron to fake the ruffle look.  So basically I iron glued fake ruffles onto a sheet and then once it resembled something like a tablecloth, I hot glued it to my table.  Oh but before I did that, I bought some grayish/lavender color burlap (1 yard at Hobby Lobby for $3.99 plus 40% off) and laid it down on the table top, hot glued it then hot glued my fake ruffle sheet on.  It looked cute, but boring.  So on top of that, I made a birthday banner and hot glued that down.  It still looked boring so then I added baby girl's name on it. Twas better.  (the red doghouse came from Hallmark and the little stuffed Snoopy came from the Planet Snoopy gift store at Kings Island)

Forks, spoons, napkins, bowls. My colors were lavender, red and white and I kept all this stuff simple. I got lavender forks and bowls from Party City, they were too expensive for my liking but it's the only place I could find the color I wanted.  I think it was $3.99 for the forks and $4.99 for the bowls.  I also bought plates from Party City they were just plain white, recycled plates for $3.99.  The napkins were plain white from the Dollar Store, and I got a white bowl that I also found at the Dollar Store to put the utensils in. Wrapped a small purple ribbon around the forks and spoons and done.

Party Favors.  My party favors were not the usual cheap toys and stuff that you usually give which was ok for me because I only made two of them.  The only kids this year were Summer's cousins, so if you are making lots of favors you probably wouldn't do all this but this is just for ideas sake.  My favors consisted of: red and purple snoopy plastic cups (I found mine at WalMart for under $1 each), snoopy stickers (found on ebay), Hersey kisses (I made little stickers to put on the bottom that said something like thanks for coming to Summer's birthday), purple and red rock candy, a Peanuts toothbrush (2 for $1, Dollar Store), a small plush Snoopy clip on (found at Hallmark for like $4/each I think) and then the last thing which had nothing to do with Snoopy were little Minnie Mouse hair clips, just because my nieces went to Disney a few weeks after Summer's party and I thought they were cute.

I laid out the contents of the cup so everything is easier to see

Cake.  I'm not going to say much on this one because we ended up having to do a homemade cake and it was nothing special.  I originally did NOT plan to make my own cake, but after calling around to local grocery stores I found out that they would not or could not make a Peanuts themed cake.  I also called around to a few local bakeries but only one place ended up getting back with me and they wanted between $65-70.  Um.. no.  So making my own seemed to be the best option.  I just made a plain white cake with almond buttercream frosting.  It was yummy and easy.  Recipes can be found here.  For the snoopy head, I made marshmallow fondant (it was not a fun baking project but it worked), printed and cut out a snoopy on printer paper, traced it on the fondant, cut it out, refrigerated it then had my husband take a black Wilton Sparkle Gel Icing pen to draw in the details.  Fondant recipe found here.

Me making a mess trying to make fondant

Highchair flair.  I bought tulle in my birthday colors (WalMart sells tulle but the ones at Hobby Lobby are much nicer quality, they have more color selections and with the 40% off it's the same price as WalMart) and just cut a bunch of strips and tied it onto ribbon (using the same method that you'd use to make a tutu) and hot glued to the booster tray.  At first I was planning on spelling out Summer's name on the front but I got lazy and just printed a giant 2 and cut it out and tied it on.

Isn't she so cute?!

Summer's Dress.  I had it custom ordered from a lady on Esty.  You can find it here.

Balloons.  I got all my balloons on Ebay.  The latex ones were less than $3.88 for a pack of 10 and the giant mylar balloon, which was close to 3 FT tall was less than $5.  Add in the cost that Publix charged to blow it up ($2) then the total for balloons wasn't much.  Unless you count the $20 small party helium tank that I bought at WalMart.  It was totally necessary though.

OK so now for the most fun and time consuming part, the snoopy poster decorations!  I found my original inspiration from this website.  I loved the idea of making my own giant snoopy poster to use as cheap decorations plus it was/is a super cute idea.  I contacted the guy from that blog about how he made his poster and he told me that he just drew his entire poster by hand, meaning no template (he will also draw and sale for anyone interested in that).  I am not that good so I had to find an easier way to draw a snoopy and boy did I!  I found this amazing website where you can upload ANY image that you want, tell it how big you want it and it blows it up for you.  The only catch is, it will print out on many printer size sheets of paper and you have to kind of piece it together like a puzzle.  So anyways, I uploaded all my images, printed them all, taped them together, cut them out and traced them onto my poster boards.  And incase I didn't mention it already, the Dollar Store sells poster boards 2 for $1.  It's very easy but very time consuming. Oh and by the way, the website it called blockposters.com.  So I did 7 posters in all, with my husband drawing all of the black detailed parts for me.  Luckily a few weeks before Summer's party we got a fence installed so we were able to have a backyard party and we just stapled the posters onto our fence.  I wanted all of my snoopys to be holding balloons too so we drew them all with hands to hold those and this is where my WalMart helium tank comes in.

Snoopy Poster Decorations:

Hubs is helping me with the posters

Just for size comparison :)

Our posters hanging on the fence

We put this guy on the garage door and used it for photo ops

This is the sign I made to put on the outside of the fence for everyone to see when they arrived.  We didn't want Summer to see her gifts beforehand since I figured it'd be too much of a distraction so we wheeled them all in when we were ready.

One last decoration that I forgot to mention was my number 2 picture collage.  I drew a 2 on a poster and took pictures of Summer from her first year and glued them all down.  Nothing fancy.

And that does it for our Snoopy party!  I know Summer won't remember these really young birthday parties but I have so much fun planning them plus I am making her awesome photo books of all her birthdays so she can look back on them when she is older.  And I figure, you only have so few birthdays as a kid that are fun before you grow up, they need to be special!  I didn't even mention that her real birthday gift was the 7 hour trip we made to Kings Island in Mason Oho to visit Planet Snoopy.  My husband, mom, sister and brother and law all went just to take a 2 year old to see the "real" Snoopy and ride a few kiddy rides.  The whole day was just for her, built around her and even though she won't remember, it's a trip that I'll remember for the rest of my life.  <3