Rainbow Party 2

A slightly belated post to go with the belated party! 

There are lots of amazing ideas and images on Pinterest for parties generally, and Rainbow themes are no exception. Take this collection for instance:

Find these ideas here

But as beautiful as all that looks, for me personally, it does feel a little over the top for a 5 year old's party. I'm not usually one to go overboard with party decorations and I'm afraid I don't have the time to invest in all that preparation for a 2 hour party either. But, our Rainbow theme did seem to lend itself to some quick and easy decorations and food preparation.

I bought some cheap, wide reels of ribbon in all the rainbow colours, and cut off strips to tie around the garden.

  

This one was dangling over a sand pit, with little gold nuggets mixed in with the sand - digging for gold at the end of the rainbow.

Theo decided this last lot of ribbons would make a good cat hammock...

There were a few scraps of ribbon, left over after decorating, that were perfect for a rainbow treasure hunt later in the party as well.

And food - it's just as easy to arrange fruit and veg in colour order as in any other way.

And rainbow fruit kebabs were simple too.

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 As for the activities, everyone painted a bag...

Some were rainbow striped, others were different designs, like these trees.

 And there was white ribbon painting too.

These were to tie into our stick 'wands'...

To create rainbow wands, inspired by these ones here at Twig and Toadstool.

The Twig and Toadstool ribbons were coloured in by markers and then they dropped rubbing alcohol on them to make the colours run, but we just painted them with watered down acrylics which worked really well and seemed simpler.

We also used coloured ribbons to tie around old curtain rings to try and recreate this kind of idea.

These ones can be bought in this Etsy Shop

Venetia decided they made good ear rings.

She looks very dubious about them here!

But I think the most popular activity was this one:

A plain sheet hanging up, and can you see those 7 spray bottles? Filled with watered down acrylics again.

Most of the spraying was directed at the sheet! And I did make these paints very much watered down! At the end of the party the sheet was covered, and quite delicately coloured really, considering the amount of spraying it took:

But then, I'm afraid, Harry and I did a very bad thing when we went out a bit later to finish tidying up the left over paints. There were quite a few dregs left in the cans and pots they'd had for the bag and ribbon painting, and that sheet was just hanging there too temptingly!

We had lots of fun throwing the dregs all over that delicately coloured sheet! Don't tell the children!

If we'd had the party at the start of the Summer, I had been planning on building a simple teepee using the plain sheet as the fabric and getting them to spray paint directly on to the teepee. But at this stage of the year I didn't think it would be worth creating the teepee, hopefully I'll use the now painted sheet for this next Summer. And in the meantime it can be used indoors for den making etc.

We left the ribbons and the sheet hanging up overnight and it was lovely to wake up the next morning, look out of the bedroom window, and see splashes of rainbow colour out there in the early morning sunshine.

Lovely to know too that I haven't got another child's birthday party to organise for a couple of months at least!

Sally.