Izzie turns 3: a Tangled party!

February 22, 2012 | by Jocie (email) |

Last week, Izzie turned 3! I can’t believe how quickly 3 years has gone. As she’s a little older now, she got to have some say in the theme of her birthday.  She loves everything princess and her two favorite princesses are Ariel and Rapunzel. She was Ariel for Halloween this past year (she loves to tell people she has red hair like Ariel, lol!), but when I suggested we have a princess party, she said she wanted to be Rapunzel. So, from there, the party evolved into an all out Tangled theme!

This is a picture of Izzie (right) and her BFF, Lily (left). Whenever Izzie goes to Lily’s house they both dress as Rapunzel, so Izzie was thrilled that Lily was also Rapunzel for her party.

To start, Ethan created a wonderful Tangled party invitation that I printed for 15¢/print at Target! Izzie chose 6 friends (and their younger siblings) who we invited to dress as their favorite prince or princess and celebrate with us.

Izzie asked for a Rapunzel dress for her birthday and was so excited to open it the morning of her party.  She also insisted that Lucy dress as “baby Rapunzel” for the party. Since the dress isn’t sold in stores in smaller sizes, I made a Baby Rapunzel costume for Lucy using tulle, sequins, ribbon, and an old purple shirt.  For the skirt, I repurposed the tutu Lucy wore on her first birthday.  Check out my earlier tutorial on how to make a tutu (and complete birthday outfit). This picture of Izzie and Lucy totally cracks me up – Izzie is having a blast, but Lucy was not very happy waking up from her nap and did not want to be put down.  hahaha

For party favors, I made Prince and Princess crowns from felt, puffy paint, and poms. The older girls’ crowns had crowns affixed to barrettes, the baby girls affixed to elastic lace, and the boys affixed to elastic. In addition to crowns, the girls were given wands and rings to accessorize their costumes. The boys were given foam swords. Check out those cute princes – Kim and Fred’s boys!

If you have seen Tangled you know that seeing the floating lanterns is Rapunzel’s dream. I wanted to recreate the floating laterns in the decor of the party, and saw a tutorial by Martha Stewart on making tissue paper pom poms.  I used bright yellow paper some some of the poms and on other poms used alternating light and bright yellow papers.  I also altered the directions Martha provides because I found hers to be thin in density and too large.  Instead of using full sheets of tissue paper, I cut them in half long ways and used 6 sheets per accordion fold (4 accordion folds and 24 (half) sheets of paper in total). I made these and hung them the night before the party, and the next morning, Izzie and I came downstairs the next morning and Izzie exclaimed, “Mommy, its the floating laterns! They’re beautiful.”  So even though these lanterns were very time consuming to make, they were totally worth it!

In addition to balloons, streamers, and laterns, we also had Tangled paper plates and plastic cups (that the kids got to take home with them). I got these for a great price at Walmart.

For table decoration, I filled a jar with skittles, put a number “3” inside,and attached helium balloons to the top. It was adorable and easy!

I’m not big on party games and Izzie and her little friends are a young enough that they had more fun running around playing without the structure of games, but we did one short game – Pin the Bow on Rapunzel’s Hair!  It was super easy to make using scrap-booking card stock for the braid and different colored card stock for the bows.

Finally, the most EPIC (and time consuming) piece of the party was Rapunzel’s tower. I saw an idea on pinterest to buy cupcake towers made out of ice cream cupcakes and so I thought I would try to replicate the idea for Izzie.

If you want to do it at home, here are a few pointers:

• Bake the cake inside the cupcake cones. Use cheap, Dollar Store lasagna pans turned upside down with holes cut out for the cones. Bake as directed for cupcakes, do not place cones on a baking sheet.
• I used fondant for the brown tower edging and Rapunzel’s braid. This was my first take at fondant and it was a ton of work and the braids were too heavy and kept falling off. If I had to do it over, I would use regular icing for the edging and maybe spaghetti noodles or yarn for the braid.
• I used icing and flower sprinkles for the ivy and flowers on the side of the tower – super cute and easy.
• Top with purple icing using a ziploc bag with a 1/2 inch hole cut in one corner.