My daughter chose a princess theme for her 5th birthday.
She loves doing crafts so we decided to make crafts that would go with the theme, use up our party time, and serve as their "goodie bags". On the computer generated invitations we specified for all the girls to wear their best princess dress. On each table, I put a small paper plate with glue and q-tips, and a small bag of craft "jewels" for each girl to use as they wished. CRAFTS: Jewelry box - I purchased small hinged wooden boxes from the craft store (got them on sale for $0.50 each) and spray painted them gold before the party. They used their jewels and glue to decorate them as they desired. Crown Necklaces - Before the party I cut out large crowns out of the styrofoam plates meat comes on from the grocers (the grocery store gave them to me free). I wrote each girl's name on a crown with a permanent marker and punched a hole in it. Then, 3 at a time, we let them watch as we placed a baking sheet with their crown on it in a 350 oven. The crowns curled up and shrank right before their eyes. Once cooled, they were hard (just like shrinky-dinks). We laced pretty ribbon through them and they wore them the rest of the party. Crowns - Before the party I cut crowns out of yellow posterboard and laced elastic through each side to wrap around a child's head. The girls were allowed to decorate their crowns with the jewels, glitter and markers. Rings - We took flat buttons with the loop in the back (no holes in them) and let each girl chose a jewel that was big enough to cover the button. They glued the jewel on. Once dry, we threaded gold "pipe cleaners" through the loop in the back and fastened the ends together to make the rings. After all the crafts, we played a quick game of "pin the crown on the frog", then off to presents. After the presents were opened, I took a photo of my daughter with each "princess" to send with the thank you note. The whole party was inexpensive, the crafts took up almost the whole time and the girls loved making princess jewelry.
