Beautiful Birthday

My youngest princess turned 8 this weekend, and we hosted a little tea party with a few of her friends who weren't otherwise occupied with Easter festivities. "Pretty" and "pink" were two of the major features of this event, so I'll let the photos primarily speak for themselves. Let me just say, though, that I'm a big fan of "simple" when it comes to the work involved in such celebrations.

Setting a pretty table -- no problem . . . just raid the china cabinet. We started with a pink striped table cloth and some napkins dh acquired through freecycle. Garage sale dishes that matched another garage sale's candlesticks (score, again!), finished off with the glasses my dear friend Alison passed along to me (thank you again, Alison! I told you they'd get well used! :) and some grocery store Eastery flowers (also a dh purchase:) Some fruit (always pretty in itself) and birthday cupcakes -- voila!

I asked my oldest daughter to help by arranging some carrots and celery on a tray. She picked up on the garden tea party theme and made them look like flowers. Somehow, what she came up with just delights me! (This photo was taken after people had already started to dig in!)

I had hoped to make pretty sandwiches, but was pressed for time at the end. The best I could do was trim the crusts with a flower shaped cookie cutter. Ya, not so pretty. But tasty -- at least to those of us who like Dempster's Ancient Grains bread. The girls preferred white bread ;)

A simple art activity was also in order since my little girl likes to make pretty things. I wanted to stick with the tea theme, so we made little tea trays with picture frames. We started with these:

I simply cleaned some frames we had lying around from garage sale projects and no-longer-hung photos, put a line of glue to hold the glass in the frames and keep moisture (from spilled tea;) out, and laid out a bunch of materials (old magazines, doilies, stickers, scrapbooking paper, decorative scissors) for the girls to create their own "tea themed" collages.

And we ended up with these:

So we could do this:

Ok, so you can't see the collage when you're serving the tea -- but when you're NOT serving the tea, you can hang the tray on the wall or set it up on a table:)

Finally, here is a sample of the girls' party favours, which dh so skillfully made up:

Oh, I suppose this post would be incomplete without a picture of the sweet birthday princess herself:

What beautiful birthday parties have you experienced that were simple but lovely? Creative and fun?