Stars and Fireworks - Another Patriotic Tulle Headband

I had a lot of fun creating a headband for the 4th of July, but the clump of star flowers left me wanting something else.  The tulle shapes looked so much like stars before I arranged them on the headband, and now they look a lot more like flowers.  I loved the simple rainbow flower I created for Pride Month, and I wanted to see if I could take this up a notch.

I had the idea to combine the look of knotted pompom headbands with a star flower in the center. This exuberance might evoke the feeling of stars and fireworks, perfect for the 4th of July!  I wasn't entirely sure if this would work, but I knew that the white star would be beautiful.

I cut 6 strips each of red and blue tulle that were approximately 2" wide and 20" long.  One at a time, I folded the strips in half and then collected them sort of bunched in the middle.  I let the folds all be one one side (I'd snip those at the end).  The reason why I bunched them one at a time is that I didn't want the centers to be perfectly aligned. I wanted it to be gathered to help turn into a flat pompom.

I tied over the center with a piece of thread, and already you could see that it flared out into a circle versus keeping the bow shape.  If I had used more tulle, this would be able to puff into a more 3D pompom but this volume was perfect for my needs.

I snipped the ends folded ends to have all of the edges look even.

To create the white tulle star, I cut 10 - 5" squares out of the white tulle.  I've now exhausted the 1/4 yard I started out with and used for both of these headbands.  My plan was to create one more 5 pointed star (see my first tulle star headband post for step by step instructions) and then put this on top of my red and blue explosion.

This accessory already looked super cute with the star on it, but it was still a little big for my liking.  I could trim the tulle shorter, but I wanted to try something to define the "fireworks" a bit more.  I decided to  knot the ends of the tulle to shorten and give it a more finished look.

You can see that there is a lot of variety in the length of my tulle strips, even as I started to knot them.  I knotted an inch or more down from the tip with the thought that I could trim the edges back later.  

This looked awesome.  So poofy and fun.  Too poofy?  I'm not sure.  I thought that I would shorten the "explosion" but decided it was worth securing it to the headband first.  If I think it is too much when it is on my head then I can trim the ties a bit.

I put the star on top and fell in love.  This looks fantastic!  I just needed to secure it to a headband and then see if it was too much on my head.  

I hot glued the accessory to the headband in two steps.  First, I glued the red and blue "explosion" to the headband.  I made sure the glue went all the way around the headband to help it stay secured.  Next, I glued the star to the center and pressed it down as it cooled to help the glue soak into the tulle a bit.  Finally, I glued a large rhinestone (not shown) to the center of the star.  

This wasn't too big at all!  This is a delightful, whimsical, almost hat-like accessory for the 4th of July.  

Initially I was afraid that this would block my view, but I could see just fine.  I proudly wore my homemade tulle headband around on the 4th of July as we went downtown with our friends.  I've heard some people say that hot glue can melt in the sun, but this headband stayed intact through a whole hot morning outside.  

For the evening, I changed out of my awesome watermelon dress and into some sparklers leggings.  Lucky liked my headband so much that he started wearing the original tulle 4th of July headband that I made.  

It is really hard to get your leggings in a selfie!  

Now I just need to pack this headband up and hope that I can keep it from getting too squished until next year.  I'm so happy that I had my own patriotic outfit this year.  I love our country and I want to fight to help move our country in a direction that is supportive of everyone who lives here.  

More Dinosaur Party Crafts

When I was pregnant with Ryder, and planning Lucky's Halloween Housewarming Birthday Party, I decided that I was going to go big for my kids' first birthday party and after that I will do fewer DIY projects.  Lucky got a big second birthday party because I knew I could re-use Halloween decorations every year.  Plus, we moved back to Massachusetts so we were able to have a large party with a lot of our family.

In the run down to the final post on Rowdy's first birthday party, I wanted to share the other Dinosaur non-edible crafts I did for this party. (Check out my dinosaur themed party food!) Many of the projects got their own posts, but the ones here are simpler to execute.

Dinosaur Foot Tissue Box

Sometimes when I find a project I need to try it right away.  I knew that decorating a tissue box to be a dinosaur foot would be super fast and make people smile.  (Remember when I made pumpkin toilet paper roll covers?)

I covered a tissue box in two pieces of green construction paper.  The width of the paper was the exact length of the tissue box. I glued paper to the small ends and then the big ends.  I folded the pieces over the top and glued them down.

Next, I cut out 3 yellow triangles and glued them to the top of the box to make a dinosaur foot.  This is way cuter than I could have imagined!  Looking at the tissue box it made me think of a costume a kid could wear, which brought me into my next project.  

Foam Dinosaur Feet

How cut would it be to be to hand out dinosaur foot covers for the guests at the party?  Of course, it would depend on how durable the food covers were, but I wanted to give it a try.

You could freehand cutting out the dinosaur, but since I found a free printable template for the dinosaur foot I figured why not follow it?

The template itself was a little short for my feet, but it would probably work nicely for kids.  (I have big feet!) 

I elongated the shape and got nice foot coverage.  Unfortunately, the foam felt like it could rip at any moment.  I think I would try to find a way to incorporate these into my decor that doesn't involve wearing them.  Rowdy would rip these off of my feet and destroy them in about 45 seconds of me walking into a room.  

I made three different colors of feet and I rotated the toe nail color between them.  They were super fast and easy to make.  maybe if I made them out of a stiff felt they would have been sturdier to wear around a bunch of toddlers and preschoolers.  

Dinosaur Egg Favors

To share my DIY rainbow dinosaur crayons with our guests, I filled some clear Easter eggs with tissue paper confetti and place one dinosaur so it would be visible in each clear half.  I couldn't decide if I should include these in favor bags, have a decorate your own favor bag station and let kids fill them up, or if I should have these near the crafting area for kids to open up and use. 

It would have been nice to give each kid multiple crayons, but if I put more than one dinosaur inside the egg you couldn't really tell what was inside.  It is hard to photograph these favors because of the glare, but when you pick them up you can really see the little dino crayon peaking out.  

Hopefully no one will mistake these crayons for candy!

When I went to order plates and other party supplies, I realized that Oriental Trading company sold dinosaur crayons.  What was funny is that these crayons (which were solid colors) are the EXACT SAME SHAPE as the ones that I made myself.  Isn't that hilarious?  

 

Dinosaur Food Labels

I found some packages of flat wooden dinosaurs at Dollar Tree leading up to the party.  I got a few packages because I knew that I would find some way to incorporate them into the party decor. Why not use them as food labels?  I painted the wood pieces green and then wrote the different dinosaur party food names on them.

I wanted to make the labels stand up because it would look better for pictures.  I cut some paper straws into quarters and then glued part of the straw to the back of the dinosaur with a hot glue gun.  

I thought I might need to do something a bit more complicated to get these to stand up, but the simple straw post worked great.  I could have trimmed the top and bottom of the straws to make it look a bit cleaner, but this was super functional so I was happy.  

I think that I've finally made it through all of the major crafts and projects I did for Rowdy's first birthday party.  My final party project is to edit the pictures and write up a post for you!  (I haven't yet shared Rowdy's smash cake photoshoot, but that is a separate event from the party itself.)  Someday I'll be all caught up on my writing again, right?  

This post contains Amazon affiliate links but I was not paid to feature any specific product.  All product selections and thoughts are my own.  

DIY Mickey Mouse Baseball Hats

I've been having a lot of fun making my own Mickey Ears for my family's upcoming first trip to Disney World.  (Some of these projects may have posted, others are in the queue.  Stay tuned!)  I knew that Lucky would be really excited about his ears, but wouldn't want to spend too much time actually wearing them.  I wanted to create something that the boys could wear at the parks that would also protect them from the sun.

My plan was to make these hats following the technique I used to make the hooded dinosaur sweatshirts. I cold cut a two sided ear, stitch up the center and then stitch them closed.   

I purchased two plain red baseball hats from a local craft store.  These are adult sized hats but my boys (16 months and 3.5 years in the photo) can wear them just fine with the adjustable velcro back.  Thankfully Rowdy (the younger one) loves wearing hats, and posing for photographs.  I also bought some 12x18 craft felt in black.  The larger sheets of felt are more expensive ($1.99 vs $0.39 locally), but the felted material is thicker and stiffer than the less expensive versions.  I used thinner felt for the dinosaur sweatshirts, but the stiffer the material the better your ears will stand up.

For the template, I used one of our drinking cups.  For the Mickey Ear Headbands I created, I used a plastic take out container as the template.  I wanted the ears on the hats to be smaller, which is why I picked a smaller cup.  

I drew the template by tracing two overlapping circles onto some cardboard and then cutting this out with my craft knife.  The whole stencil is just under 6.5" x 3.75".  

Next, I needed to trace the template onto the felt and cut out two ears for each hat.  On black felt, I like to use a water soluble white marking pencil.  I wish that they made air soluble marking pens in white so they could be used on dark fabric, but being able to wipe off the pencil marks with a damp cloth is useful.

I drew some lines down the center to help give myself a guide of where to sew.

I folded each hat in half to get the approximate center of each side and pinned the center of the ears onto this line.

I've been sewing a lot of Mickey ears lately, and to keep from having to create new bobbins and change the thread frequently I've been sewing with clear thread.  Black thread would have been perfectly appropriate for this project, but I didn't bother switching it out.

After sewing the first seam the ear felt a little floppy.  Therefore I stitched two more seams, each a very short distance from the center line.

One seam

Three seams

I pinned the two sides of the ear together and stitched around the outside edge of the ears.  I tried to sew as close to the edge as I could without leaving any gaps.  (There are some small gaps near the hat but you can't tell unless you look really closely.)

I had the second ear pinned and ready to go but was forced to wait because the boys woke up.  If I didn't get interrupted I would have been able to finish both of these hats in very little time.  You could easily make multiple hats for your entire family in an afternoon.  

I can feel the ears move when I move my head, but the ears are standing up nice and straight.

This project went by so quickly.  It would be really simple to add ears like this to the top of a hooded sweatshirt, too.  Place them just a little beyond the front edge and do a similar stitching technique for each ear.

I'm having so much fun making Mickey Mouse accessories for my upcoming Disney World trip.  Will these keep me from buying a lot of souvenirs while I'm at the parks?  I'm not sure.  But you really can't beat two custom Mickey hats for under $5 each.  

After I had the idea to make these simple hats, I started thinking of many ways to make the hats more complicated.  I could add velcro to the ears and then make detachable felt decals to add to them depending on where we were headed that day.  (I might still do this!)  Alternatively, we could keep the hats simple and classic looking.  Now that I think about it, you could just add the hook side of velcro to the back of the embellishment and leave the ears themselves plain and it should still stick just fine.

When I was researching what we would need to pack with us to bring to the parks, I made a few discoveries.  There are dozens, well maybe hundreds, of smooshed penny machines around the parks.  I've collected these since I was a child, so I'll need to start saving up pennies and quarters.  I also was reminded that the Disney characters will sign autographs.  There are a lot of DIY options to make fun autograph books, but I'm not even sure that my boys will want to go up to the characters, let alone ask for an autograph!  These hats are a perfect solution.  I'm not carrying around a book that will get smooshed, ripped and unused.  If Lucky and Rowdy are super excited about the characters, they can have them sign their custom baseball hats.  This idea isn't unique, there are tons of autograph shirts out there, but this is a way to (potentially) repurpose a project that I was already committed to making.  

I mentioned to Lucky that he might be able to get characters to write their names on his hat... and boy was he horrified.  He doesn't want ANYBODY writing on ANY HATS.  At least he thought the hats themselves were cute!

This post contains some Amazon Affiliate links.  All product selections, thoughts and opinions are my own and were unsolicited. 

Dinosaur Themed Food for a Dinosaur Birthday Party

Rowdy is now 18 months old.  Can you believe it?  I am still playing catch up when it comes to blog posts because, well, I'm home full time with an 18 month old.  It is hard to find the time to set down and write when Rowdy wants to sit in my lap, read books, or open and close Lego suitcases for 30 minutes straight.  In the Fall Rowdy will start preschool with Lucky so I should have some time to dedicate to writing and filming again.  Nevertheless, I'm happy to finally share some of the fun Dinosaur themed foods I created for Rowdy's first birthday party.

Fossil Cookies

I thought it would be fun to take sugar cookies up a notch and make some fossil cookies.  After a lot of experimentation, I settled on the following technique:

1. Make sugar cookie dough according to the package directions for shaped cookies (or use your favorite recipe from scratch)
2. Roll the dough out
3. Have a blast with your toddler making footprints on the dough and pressing imprints of the dinosaurs.
   
   
   
4. Cut the dough into cookie sized pieces with a knife.  I tried to to irregular shapes so it would look like cracks.
   
   
5. Bake according to your recipe directions.
   
   

If you want to make an imprint of the side of a dinosaur, make sure that you press it into the dough REALLY hard so it will show up after baking.

I spent a lot of time looking for dinosaur figurines that had different foot shapes, and then Lucky was gifted a Terra Container of Mini Dinosaurs for Christmas.  These were the perfect scale to fit many different footprint shapes into the dough.


Candy Dinosaur Nests

I love making chocolate covered crunchy snacks for parties.  Chocolate covered chow mein noodles have become spiders and crabs, chocolate covered pretzels have turned into pumpkins, so why not do something similar to make little dinosaur nests?  I happened to have a huge box of Rice Krispies on hand so I decided to mix these with some melted chocolate chips to create Dinosaur nests.  Ultimately I decided to add marshmallows the mix and create some Chocolate Rice Krispies Treats for the nests.  First, I used  my dinosaur candy mold and colored candy wafers to create some dinosaur shaped candy to sit on the nests.

I microwaved the wafers in a ziplock bag in 30 second increments until it was melted.  I mixed the colors together with my hands and then clipped off a corner to fill the molds.  I mixed yellow and dark green candy wafers to get a gradient of green dinos.  For the middle green I used a ratio of 7 green: 3 yellow.  I found that 40 melted wafers filled 9 of the dinosaur shapes.  For the yellow-green, I used 38 yellow and 12 green dinosaurs.  For the deepest green I used only dark green wafers.

I made the chocolate Rice Krispies Treats and then added balls to a greased muffin tin.  I made sure there was an indentation in the center to form a little cup for the "nest."   Then I added my candy dinosaurs to the center of each nest while they were still warm.  

The dinosaur candy melted just a little bit.  Not enough for the dinosaurs to lose their shape but enough to secure them to their chocolate nests.  These were DELICIOUS and super cute.

Baked Dinosaur Tortilla Chips

I've made my own pita chips before, but I've never tried to make my own tortilla chips. When I found this idea on Pinterest I knew it was a fun project that I could make in advance for Rowdy's party.  I used a Dinosaur sandwich cookie cutter to cut dinosaurs out of some Spinach, Garlic and pesto tortillas. Since I didn't have an oil spritzer, I brushed some olive oil on top of the cutouts and sprinkled them with coarse salt.  I baked the chips at 275 degrees F for 15 minutes.

I hand cut some triangles out of the excess tortillas.  I knew that I would want some small triangles to use to make some dinosaur dip!

There were a lot of extra pieces after cutting out the dinosaurs.  I turned these into chips, too and the boys had them as a crunchy, tasty snack.

Guacasaurus and Hummusaurus

I wish I could take credit for the Guacasaurus and Hummusaurus, but I found the inspiration for these fun dips in a blog post from a 4 year old's dinosaur birthday party.  This was also the inspiration for Rowdy's cake.)  

I used some of the triangle tortilla chips that I made above to create the spines and horns of these fun little creatures.  I forgot to get sour cream so I used some plain Greek yogurt to help make the eyes.  

Dinosaur Cakes

When Rowdy was an itty baby, I found that Wilton had some adorable dinosaur cupcake kits.  These came with legs and tails on the cupcake wrapper, edible sprinkle spines and the heads on toothpicks.

I made some funfetti cupcakes for these little dino cupcakes.  I was afraid that the legs and the tail wouldn't show up if I used chocolate.  

I think that if I were going to design these cupcakes myself, I might make a tail out of candy or something to make that more obvious.  After baking the cupcakes, the wrapper decorations were pretty subtle.

Triceratops Cake

I did a lot of research on my dinosaur party Pinterest page before settling on a cake design.  When I found this Triceratops cake tutorial I knew that it was something I could attempt to re-create myself.

I baked two round cakes plus an extra square cake in a Brownie pan.  Unlike the tutorial, I wanted to use cake for the dinosaur's crest on top of the head.  I cut the triangles such that the side attached to the head was from the edge of the pan.  This meant that the points were thicker and raised up a bit.  

I think it was really brilliant how the tail and the head are cut from one round cake.  (I forgot to take a picture of how they fit together.)  

Icing this cake was... hard.  I don't think I appreciated how hard it would be to frost cut pieces of cake without them falling apart.  I was able to "make it work" and I think that I ended up with a darling homemade cake for my little one.  

I didn't have a backup cake baked if this failed.  I think my backup would have been to quickly make a sheet cake and put my kid's name on it.  Look how cute this Triceratops came out, though!  

In addition to these fun dino themed foods I shared in this post, I turned a lot of other "normal" party foods into dinosaur foods.  I can't wait to show you the spread that I put out at the table!  

I just asked Lucky what kind of birthday party he wants this October.  Lucky has officially requested a Dinosaur themed birthday party, too!  We are gently suggesting other ideas, but I am happy that my kids have picked up my love for dinosaurs. We'll see if Lucky changes his mind as we get closer to October, but I might have to come back to these ideas.

This post contains Amazon affiliate links but I was not paid to feature any specific product.  All product selections and thoughts are my own.