Lola's Art Party

October is always a super busy month for our family. Between Halloween and all its preparations, visiting a pumpkin patch, school festivals and harvest festivals it's already a pretty crazy month. Throw in Lola's birthday right in the middle of the month and crazy takes on a whole different meaning!

This year we celebrated Lola's 7th birthday with an art themed party. As usual, she came up with the theme and was eager to help plan all of the fun. It was such a great party theme with endless options for creative fun. Let's take a look...

For the party invitations I had a ton of different ideas going through my head (as did Lola) but none of them seemed quite right. Then an image of Lola as an artist popped into my head and I knew that it was perfect. So she dressed up in a striped shirt, placed a beret on her head and added one last touch - a paint brush balanced perfectly on Lola's duck face pout! If you know Lola, you'll know that she is the self described queen of duck face (take that Kylie Jenner!) so it seemed only fitting that her favorite selfie pose be included on the invitation. Plus it totally worked with the whole French artist look!

I also used the image from the invitations on the party favors which were simple Crayola water color sets with the label changed out. I bought the water color kits in bulk from Amazon. You can find them here. The kids all also got a beret to wear as a party hat. You can find the party pack of costume berets that I bought here. They're not nice berets like the one Lola wore for the invitation photo, but they're perfect for an art party.

The image from the invitation was also used for an activity at the party which you'll see soon!

With so many different art related activities available, I wanted to make things easier by just having a few dedicated art projects for the Lola's friends to work on. Lola helped me choose a few fun art activities that were a little out of the ordinary for her friends to create. The kids have always enjoyed the bicycle powered spin art creations that they've made at festivals such as Pedalfest, so we decided to go for something similar and create spin art with a salad spinner. I wish I had some fun photos to show you of the process, but I was busy showing the kids how to put it all together and missed taking any fun action shots. We'll have to work on a DIY to share because it's seriously lots of fun - and so easy. Here's a look at what the kids created. Don't they look fantastic? Mathilde did her own thing and painted a stripey school bus that looks like a happy bee!

The other art project I set up for the kids was marbling with watercolors and shaving cream. This was one of those projects I've been wanting to do with the kids for such a long time but have never gotten around to. Now that we've done it once it's definitely something we'll be doing again. It's so easy and the results look amazing. Once again I was too busy spraying shaving cream into dishes to take photos but I'll definitely share a DIY soon. There was a lot of variety in way the kids worked for this particular project. Lola and her friends were very careful and added small amounts of water color to the shaving cream. Ava and the other older kids went completely overboard!

Our next activity was Pin the Paintbrush on the Artist! I blew up the image of Lola with the paintbrush on her top lip and made up lots of little paper paintbrushes for her friends to try and stick on her face.I get the feeling Lola might be able to see out of the blindfold in the photo below!

It was then time for cake! Lola chose a strawberry cake and I made it in the shape of a simple paint pallet covered with fondant with tasty blobs on colored icing. I really need to work on my "writing with icing" and fondant skills, but the kids overlooked the mess and thought it was fantastic. 

As usual there was too much of a breeze up on the roof to keep all of the candles lit throughout Happy Birthday, but we managed to get a few lit so Lola didn't have to pretend to blow out candles. Trying to get this crazy bunch of kids to all look at the camera was even harder than trying to light all of the candles!

After cake the kids pretty much did what they always do when we have parties on the roof - they took all the chairs and made a giant fort on the fake grass area!

We were lucky to have such a lovely day for Lola's birthday party. The weather was perfect and the sky was clear and blue. We had planned for Lola's party to be held on her actual birthday the weekend earlier but the Bay Area was blanketed with smoke and ash from the fires in Santa Rosa and Sonoma so it wasn't safe to have all the kids up on the roof.

Thanks to everyone who celebrated Lola's 7th birthday with us. We had such a fun day!

I'll have a couple of fun DIYs for the art projects coming soon so stay tuned!