Wow the start of 2013 has just seemed to fly by, I can't believe the end of Feb looms so close. It's already been a super busy year for us here at Vanilla Milkshake Events, which has made setting aside time to blog a difficult task. But here at last is my first blog for the year and it's a fun one.
The Muppets made a come back with their 2011 movie release and just like the movie suggests these forgotten stars have once again been thrown into the spotlight. The movie combines good old fashioned feel good entertainment with some of the quirks and humor of modern film. A perfect film for the family and an amazing platform for a themed party.
Everybody loves Kermie and just as he is the star of the show, he must be the star of the party, so naturally he needs to be the face that invites the guests. I made these invites from different color card, a little time consuming to cut out all the different pieces, but the end result is effective.
This client was great, because she wanted everything themed and really let us go all out. This was the food table with a number of themed party foods as well as the child's name as the centre piece, which of course had to be done Muppet style.
Inspired by a Muppet party the client found on the internet and loved, I made the letter's of the birthday boy's name into the different characters from the Muppets. This was relatively easy to achieve by simply adding eyes and mouths cut from cardboard. Then just to add even more Muppet to the mix, Miss Piggy and Kermie did a duet on either side of the centre piece. Because the Muppets are puppets and many of them are made with feathery bits as eyebrows or hair I decided to play on this with feather boas. For the centre piece I stuffed them into the pots holding the birthday boy's name.
A big part of the food table was the Kermit the Frog cake I made. This was no small cake, but I was really happy with the way he came out as shaped cakes are a little outside of my comfort zone. It was great having an almost life size Kermit chilling in the middle of the food table.
For the themed food we did our usual decorated
lollipops which just look so great in Muppet form with
the bright colors and fun characters. Then I also made very unique popcorn cones in the form of the different characters. These were one of my favorite of the themed goodies we made for this event. The other character themed food item we made were these crazy Muppet cake pops. Be warned these are a huge amount of work and no easy task. Bakerella makes this stuff look so easy. I certainly don' t have her skill, but never the less I think our cake pops still turned out pretty cute.
I also made these fun character cupcakes as part of the themed food. The client wanted quite a few cupcakes which made it possible for me to make a number of the different characters including the grumpy old men and the mahna mahnas.
In South Africa the Muppets aren't all that popular or a very common theme for birthday parties so finding themed plates, cups, blowouts and so on was never going to happen. We could have ordered from the US, but we were working with a very short time line, 8 days to be exact. So instead I decided to make normal available plates into muppet plates.
For the cups I decided there was more than enough of the characters floating around so I simply added the Muppet 'M' onto Kermit-green paper cups.
I love the way these Kermit blow outs came out and it was so simple. All I did was print a pic of Kermit's face off the internet and cut a hole for the blower. Now when you blow the blow out Kermit sticks his tongue out at you, just as a frog should;)
The kiddies tables were set out like this with the green representing Kermit and the red his tongue. Instead of traditional organza tie backs I decided instead to use feather boas once again playing on the featheriness of the characters.
The chickens always seem to play a role in the Muppets and they even have their own number to perform in the the movie. I found an example of how to make Camilla the Chicken on the internet and adapted it to create these 3D props which we hung from the ceiling over the party tables.
Other general decor for this party included a Muppet studio sign at the entrance and then a few of the favorite characters as wall decor.
Our final contribution to the event were the party packs for the kiddie's to take home. I converted these party buckets into the characters using cardboard, polystyrene and making three dimensional shapes using a thin foam. The girls could choose between Miss Piggy or a manha manha creature and for the boys was the ever dashing Kermit. Each child also took home a finger puppet, which makes sense when the most important guests at the party are puppets.
So the Muppets put on a great show for us here in Cape Town and we can't wait to have them back again;)
