Sophia's 8th birthday Spa Party! Part 1

I've had a couple people ask me for details on the Spa party so rather than type a bunch of separate e-mails I thought I'd dust off the old, severely neglected blog and put the info here.

Most people know I love to plan parties and I get rather into the details, so this may get a little long- I'm going to split it up into 3 separate posts since there are a lot of photos.  This was such a fun party to plan and execute!  What girl - big or little- doesn't love to be pampered?

For the invitations, we used a template found on Martha Stewart for a sleep mask (if the link doesn't go directly to the spa mask, it's #4 of the 13 photos in the article).  We made ours from felt, scrap fuzzy fabric, and ribbons hot glued together - with a few dried lavender buds inside - and printed the invite on cardstock (FYI- the pink isn't on the actual invite, it's JUST blurring out our contact info, just in case!).

Party Favors:

Sophia saw some photos of spa treatments and noticed the women were all wearing robes so she asked if I could get all the girls matching pink robes to wear.  That was entirely out of the budget ;) so instead we made "Spa wraps"/pool cover-up dresses for each girl. Inexpensive towels, ruffle trim, elastic and velcro - much more budget-friendly!

It was a little interesting at times on my old sewing machine, and I won't allow any of my friends who are actually good seamstresses to look at them too closely, but in the end they turned out cute and served the purpose well.  Hopefully they'll also hold up long enough that the girls can use them as pool covers, too! The rest of the party favors included "spa shoes" (Dollar-tree flip flops covered with the scraps from the wraps), a spa headband ($-tree) and a Piggy Paints pedicure set (stocking stuffers I got super cheap on holiday clearance a few months back) in a pink plastic bucket.

Decorations:

I mostly used decorations from Sophia's bedroom and items saved from previous parties (it works well for me that she always wants pink in her party themes!).  Large plastic tablecloths cut lengthwise were the streamers on the light fixture.  The "S-P-A" letters are from my (unfinished) name letter project for Sophia's wall.  Her name happens to have all the right letters so I grabbed them!

Pink tulle tied onto inexpensive white washcloths to keep with the "spa" theme.

Even Gracie got into the spa mood!

Food:

We kept the snacks light and simple - pink strawberry lemonade along with-

Pink popcorn! 
(click link for recipe)

 "Spa slipper" nutter butter cookies

 Tea sandwiches - PB&J and cucumber with cream cheese

 Rainbow fruit salad skewers.

The party!

As soon as the girls arrived we started the afternoon with a snack and a little discussion about "spa etiquette".  It was pretty funny to watch them transform from running around and (literally) jumping off the furniture into "ladies" ready for an afternoon of spa pampering.

After snack, we headed to the dining room to change into our spa wear and prepare for pampering.

 The girls each got to make their own custom-scented sugar scrub for our "spa staff" to use during their foot soak/massage.

Then the girls split into 2 groups and started making their way through the spa stations.

Continued in next post (lots of photos!).