Our upcoming princess party…

Last weekend Emily got introduced to Frozen the movie and she now thinks she's queen Elsa or Princess Ana. She watches "Let it go" about 10x a day. So per Emily's request she wants a Frozen princess birthday party. Our little princess just has so many demands for being only three. As I scramble online to look for Frozen decorations I quickly came to realize that Frozen anything equals $$$$. Ugh… I was pretty sad. I really didn't want to spend a lot of money on decorations. I'm budget Kimba remember… So I thought long and hard and made my own decorations with what I have at home.

So … for $0 I made this:

Lucky us, I have a lot of Christmas decorations. I took out our two white christmas trees and started decorating. The rest of the decorations are just paper. I bought some Dollartree construction paper for Emily's birthday before so I simply just used whatever that was left.  I made the banner out of construction paper. The paper quality isn't the best but its just a banner. I don't think anyone would really notice. I usually like my banners to be simple because I don't have a fancy circuit.  I just cut blue construction paper into my desired shape, pink paper into a circle, and print out a simple dark blue letter on white paper and taped them all together. Snow flakes were made out of regular white paper. Taped everything up and called it a day. The characters were made out of simple cardboard paper held up by a half empty water bottle. The real dolls/figurines were too expensive for me to buy so I made them out of cardstock paper.

I still have the main table to decorate. Here's a simple in progress display of what I have so far:

 

I'm still missing a lot of details on this table (i.e birthday banner, cake, etc) but its a good start. I made all the water bottle labels out of regular cardstock. After I designed and printed out my water bottle labels, I started cutting them into strips. 

As I was working on the design, I put our little  princess Emily to work also. She volunteered to pull off all the labels. She was so proud to help out with her party. Every time grandparents came over she would run to get her water bottle to show off to them that she helped make them.

 

Here's a bottle up close. 

 

Here's all of them completed. 

Coordinating party favors were made using white target paper lunch bags, dollartree party favors, and a label I made and printed from home. Cost for this whole table display so far is under $30 including water bottles, favor bags, and wannabe cake stand.  Hopefully I'll be back soon to blog about her final table display once its finished. Most likely it won't be done until the day of her party. I'm a procrastinator like that.

I wanted to really blog about event planning because I wanted everyone to know that party decorations don't have to cost a lot. There are many simple ways to have a themed party on a budget. Look around your house for items that can be used and always save left over party supplies for future parties. For each party that I've hosted, I've made one or two big purchases so I can save for future parties. For example, I purchased a waterslide for the kids because I knew renting a jumper/waterslide overtime would cost us more. So far the slide has been a big hit for every party. I've also bought chairs for $1 each on craigslist so I don't even have to rent chairs anymore. This party I didn't really have to buy anything big. Decorations hardly cost me anything so now I only have to worry about ordering food. 

Next post will be about expensive cakes and how to save money on them. I'm still in the trial and error stages of trying different techniques so I'll be back with more details soon. As for now, happy planning everyone. 

** As for anyone who needs help or wants to use any of my templates please PM me. I'm happy to share free templates.