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Clown Party -3yr- Face Painting Booth

December 2004

Milele in Durham, North Carolina USA

Honorable Mention

For our boy/girl twin’s 3rd birthday we planned a clown party. 

For the invitations, I bought assorted colored cards and envelopes.  On the outside of the card it read Oh, what fun it will be to clown around with us as we celebrate turning 3!  Thus far on all of their birthday invitations I have included a picture of them since my family lives on the other side of the country and only gets to see the children about once a year.  For this year to tie the picture in with the clown theme, I used a cut out of their face and glued it and ‘clown outfits’ to the front of the invite. 

I used two colors of felt for the actual outfit, a foam sparkle triangle piece for the hat and glued pom-poms on top of the ‘hat’ and for ‘buttons’ on the outfit. The inside of the invite contained all the party details.  No two invites were alike and everyone loved them.  My mother told me all of my family in California had their invite proudly displayed on mantels, refrigerators, shelves, etc.   

For the actual party, I used three rooms in the downstairs portion of the house.  One room was for food, another for games/booths and another for crafts. 

For the rooms with carpets I used colorful parachutes under the tables.  This gave the room a ‘circus ring’ feel, but more importantly protected my carpet.  Balloons and streamers decorated the outside of the house and each party room in the house. 

I borrowed tables and chairs from my children’s daycare so they would be child size and enough seating space for the 17 children that attended (lots of cousins on my husband’s side). I dressed the twins in clown outfits similar to the ones on their invite and their 22-month old sister proudly wore a colorful clown wig, which she kept on the whole time.  We started the party off with a craft session. 

Each child was given a felt clown collar and a cone shape party hat.  They were then able to decorate their hat and collar with pom-poms, bells, cut out foam and sparkle pieces, and glitter.  The collars were fastened using stick-on Velcro tabs.  After the children made their clown ‘outfit’ they were then able to go to the face-painting booth to get their face painted and receive their clown nose (MakesParties.com).  The children loved this; some coming back two or three times to get more face paint. Several parents told me that the children didn’t want to take the paint off, some even asking to wear it to church the next day. 

After the face painting, we played pin the nose of the clown.  For food, we had carnival/circus type food.  The children were able to go to various booths (hot dog, cotton candy, popcorn/cracker jacks/pretzels, and lemonade) to fill their plates.  I also had a fruit stand (to add some nutrition) where I used plastic clown derby hats as bowls to hold fruit salad. The partyware kept with the clown theme.  I order ‘Juggle the Clown’ tablecloths, plates, napkins, and cups from PartyEtc.com (by far the cheapest site I found on the web).  The cake was a clown cupcake cake (24 cupcakes decorated with different color icing and arranged to form one big clown face). 

After eating, the twins opened their presents and thanked their guest with clown-inspired goody bags filled with clown stickers, water squirt rings, kazoos, dum-dum suckers, bubbles, sunglasses, cotton candy and clown suckers.  I made clown suckers that looked like Juggles the Clown using a sucker mold (Sugarcraft.com) and colored candy melts (Michael’s and AC Moore).  The children loved them and the adults wanted them too! 

Thank you notes with a picture of the twins in their clown outfits were sent out to all guests.  Also I emailed pictures from the party to everyone who could not attend with a note saying: We had fun clowning around.  Wish you were there!  A good time was had by all and we are already planning their sister's 2nd birthday party--Balloons.  Stay tuned.

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