It's A Ponyo Party

Since about mid May this year, I'v been working like a busy bee looking for inspiration for my daughters' 4th birthday bash. Her theme? Ponyo! Ponyo is a Hayao Miyazaki film from Japan and have partnered with Disney to bring this wonderful film to the United States. Well, I assumed she would be asking for a Dora the Explorer party so she caught me off guard with the Ponyo theme. But Super Mom rose to the challenge and I have been busy drawing, painting, sewing, & basically doing all I can to make this the most awesomest party I can. We placed a deposit at the San Antonio Childrens Museum in the under the sea themed party room to go along with the Ponyo theme. I bought some posterboard at Dollar Tree & drew Ponyo. Add paint and voila!. Ponyo came to life..well not literally. Lol. But she did look mega awesome. I decided to mount her onto foam board and display her on the main table where the food will be. Ah but then I thought "Well, it would look pretty weird if its just Ponyo on the one side of the table." So I painted the little castle where Ponyo's sisters live. Fairly easy & I will be mounting that onto foam board as well. Then I purchsed more posterboard at Dollar Tree. Green this time and I decided I won't be using ordinary envelopes to mail the invites..I'm going to cut out buckets & put the invit.es inside. So I used my trusty ruler and cut out buckets big enough to accomodate the 4x6 invitation. Glued both pieces together to make a small pocket. Yay! Unique envelopes! :) I haven't even started about the invitations I found on etsy.com. They are by daddyinvites. It's just the file but he customizes it and adds all the party details. Then you just print them out at your local Walgreens. I ordered Them online and had them mailed since I didn't want them glossy like pictures but matte. :) I googled Ponyo birthday party and came across happybirdycake.com and she made felt Ponyo puppets for her daughters' party. I did just that. I purchased felt from Walmart and the colors that they didn't carry, I ordered on etsy. I handsewed each and every Ponyo as I do not own my own sewing machine which was sooo time consuming but all worth it for my Selena. I used hot glue instead of fabric glue for a stronger hold and to be a little different, I've decided to make 10 of them puppets and 10 of them stuffed Ponyos. I purchased the green buckets at Party City for 99¢ each so I got 20. Only instead of the blue easter grass she used, I used blue paper shreds. Something else I have done is buy a basket of seashells that I found at Dollar Tree. I used the nicer whiter seashells and brushed glue onto them and sprinkled them with extra fine glitter. The bottom shells were actually almost black so I used a couple of coats of white acylic paint. I let those dry overnight and the next day I handpainted Ponyo on each of them. They turned out fantastic! But it still wasn't enough for me. I painted Sosuke's house on the cliff by the sea as well. Now that was Wow factor. For now I shall end this post but this magical journey is far from over. Until next time friends! :)