Sunshine turned six yesterday, so we had her birthday party on Friday. Now, party planning stresses me out, particularly when it involves planning activities for a group of children for a few hours. My husband and I tossed around a few ideas before we came up with an idea we liked. What’s Sunshine’s all-time favourite movie? Disney’s Tangled. So we decided to throw Disney Tangled birthday party!
Where do you find ideas for a themed birthday party? Pinterest, of course. I did a quick search and soon had all oodles of ideas to choose from. Here’s what we ended up doing…
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1. Tangled Birthday Party Invitations
I fell in love with these invitations from Paging Supermom because they were simple and elegant. When my husband and I finally had a chance to sit down and figure out when to have the party and how many kids we were going to invite, I printed off the invitations right away and filled them in so that Sunshine could give them to her friends at school the next morning.
If I’d had more time, I would have glued the printed invitations inside a blank greeting card and decorated the front with another picture of Rapunzel.
2. Rapunzel Party Decorations
We live in a townhouse, so I often put something outside to help people find our place. For our Tangled birthday party, I printed a page of these free banners and then taped them to our front door.
Inside, I printed several paper flowers and put them up around the entry way. Sunshine and Lily had fun counting how many flowers and running back and forth between them, so I could have worked that into some sort of game.
Finally, we made six lanterns. I printed the pattern on a normal piece of paper, then glued one edge and rolled the paper into a lantern. (Glue sticks worked better here than tape.) I set the lanterns on the windowsill and the ledge between the kitchen and the dining room.
If we’d had the party later in the evening, we could have put little electric tea lights inside to make them glow.
3. Tangled Birthday Party Activities
All Sunshine’s friends arrived at once, and they had just as much energy and excitement as Sunshine and Lily about the party about to start.
We gathered them in the living room and I found a YouTube clip from the movie. They all had pink or purple balloons to dance and throw into the air while the music played.
This is one of Sunshine’s favourite birthday party games; in past year, I’ve stopped the music if a balloon hits the floor or gotten them all to grab a balloon when the music stops. This time, they just wanted to dance.
Once they’d worn off some energy, we went back to the dining room to do a craft. We made Pascal party blowers. I had one made to demonstrate what we were doing and I’d arranged the other supplies in piles for each child: party blower, green craft foam, googly eyes. Because we were using glue instead of self-adhesive foam, I also used binder clips to hold the craft together until the glue dried. (You can also find more realistic Pascal party blower printables on Etsy.)
I’d also printed several Rapunzel colouring pages, so when a girl was waiting for help with her craft or had finished her craft, she could do some colouring. They probably could have coloured for a lot longer, but we had more activities planned…
I had printed a Flynn Rider Wanted poster and stuck it up in our hallway. While everyone was colouring, I gave them each two paper frying pans to write their names on. When they finished colouring, we lined them up to play Pin the Frying Pan on Flynn.
While my husband coordinated this game, I started cleaning up the colouring. Then we sent them down the hall to play more musical balloons with another Tangled song so I could set the table for a quick snack. We had a purple plastic table cloth, pink plates and napkins, princess cups and princess party hats.
After the snack, we watched Tangled. One girl found the movie a bit scary, so we set up the colouring again for her. She was soon joined by Sunshine and another girl who had seen the movie “a million times.” The other girls continued watching and the movie gave us a bit of a quiet interlude in a very Tangled birthday party. (Whew!)
Since so many of the kids had already seen Tangled, another idea would have been to watch the TV series together. Tangled: Before Ever After and Tangled: The Series: Queen For A Day are both fun short movies about Rapunzel, Flynn, Pascal and their friends.
4. Rapunzel Birthday Cake
Every birthday party needs a cake, and this is another part of the party that left me stressed out. I did check out cakes at our local bakery, but they only had Cinderella or Ariel cakes. I can’t draw and I don’t often decorate cakes, so I didn’t feel up to doing a princess. A friend of mine suggested a tower, which also sounded complicated. I ended up using the sun image from Tangled.
I baked two round chocolate cakes with a family recipe and made Swiss buttercream icing (which my cousin had made for her birthday cupcakes and promised wasn’t very hard to make). I coloured the icing a pretty orange and then used my ancient piping tube to draw a sun on the top of the cake.
Then my husband came in and suggested that I do the “background” for the sun in purple, and so we played with food colouring until we managed to turn the orange into a purple. (I recommend splitting the icing into two batches if you want two colours!)
After the movie, we gathered the kids back at the table to sing “Happy Birthday” and eat cake. Sunshine also opened her presents quickly.
5. Tangled Goody Bags
I used simple small paper gift bags for the Tangled birthday party goody bags. On one side, we glued a Rapunzel thank-you card (from Pinterest) and on the other side we glued a name card. Inside the bags we put each girls’ Pascal party blower (once the glue dried) and colouring pages. The bags also had a kids nail polish, some bubbles, a Rapunzel colouring pack, and a Rapunzel tiara-and-braid.
We had Rapunzel tiaras by the door when the girls arrived, thinking they could wear them for the party, but none were interested in that, so we put them in their goody bags. (Older girls could probably braid the tiaras themselves if you cut the yarn into sections for them; I did it while watching TV with my hubby one night.)
And that was Sunshine’s Tangled birthday party! Now Lily is talking about what she wants to do for her fourth birthday in a few months…
Have you done a themed birthday party?
If you’re planning a party soon, here’s more Birthday Party Ideas for girls!
You may also enjoy checking out Sunshine’s other parties:
2 Comments
How fun!! Now I want a Tangled themed birthday party! lol
Go for it!!! 🙂 LOL.