Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Saving Money Challenge: Even MORE Homemade Party Decorations

In case you haven't read up on my Saving Money Challenges, I'm on a "birthday party" kick.  So far, I've spent a $1 making a Big Birthday Banner and $3 making homemade streamers of sorts.  I'm not done.  Oh no.  Never.


Here are even more decorations that I have made.  To give you a little background, I'm having a Smurf Party for my 6 year-old.  He picked the theme.  I just ran with it.  So we'll have some little hooligans in our backyard for a while here in April.  I like to prep stuff though because this crap is more exciting for me than the kids.  

Since the kids are a little more "older" and "with" it.  I'm going to have 4 stations/Smurf villages set up in my backyard.  These are going to be as follows:

Handy Smurf - Build something (They sell cheapo kits at Michaels for a $1 or something.  I'm thinking these, but might go with foamy things). 

Painter Smurf - Either paint said building project or just have paper and paint.  I have paint and brushes galore.  I'm saving egg cartons to use as paint holders.

Baker Smurf - I'm going to have 2 sugar cookies for each child ready to decorate with frosting and sprinkles.

Farmer Smurf - Each kid will plant some seeds in their take home planter and will also be awarded the opportunity to dig for worms in my untilled garden.  I was going to try to borrow a tiller or rent one this season - but nah.  Making 15-20 kids dig in my dirt patch should be efficient enough as a till.  

So I made 4 signs to hang along my fence as my "Smurf Villages".  I have to do one more coat of paint on the letters and I'll be done.  This was really cheap for me.  $2 to be exact.  

First, I bought 4 blue poster boards at the Dollar Tree for .50 cents each.  That's my $2.  

I have cardstock letters that I bought from Staples a while ago with Staples Rewards that were going to expire.  So I spelled out what I needed with those and traced them.  Put the cardstock letters back in their bag.

I have a bunch of paint in the house (cheapo paint - they have it at Michaels for like a $1 and sometimes it goes on sale for .39 cents or .59 cents a bottle.  CLICK HERE to get a general idea of what it looks like).  So I painted my traced letters with white.  

I then did a Google Image search for each Smurf I needed.  Clicked on desired image, scaled it to fit on a 8X11 piece of paper and printed in color.  I cut around each Smurf and hot glue gunned them in the middle.  


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