5419

Fairy Party 4yr - Baby Faries

Jan 2003

Giskin in Kenley, Surrey, UK

Runner-Up

Fairy party for a 4-year-old  For my daughter’s fourth birthday we devised a fairy party that is still talked about in these here parts, mainly because each child received a book in their gift bag of a fairy adventure they actually participated in at the party.  

Invitations For the invitation I pencil-sketched a fairy and used my color printer to print it out on translucent paper (I could fit about six per page so it wasn’t too expensive). I cut these out and used spraymount to stick them to pink card. I used accent beads on the wings to give them that extra sparkle. Inside, I used a curly font for the printing, inviting each girl to come dressed as a fairy if they wished, but to make sure they brought outdoor shoes and a coat as well. For thank-you cards afterwards, my daughter drew a really pretty fairy so I scanned and printed that on blue card this time. 

The games Instead of having a lot of separate games, I invented one fairy adventure game incorporating a series of activities. When everyone had arrived, I had all the girls sit in a ring and used one of my daughter’s bigger, soft dolls to be ‘Sparkle’ the fairy. I made Sparkle be a puppet. Sparkle explained that she was supposed to be looking after the baby fairies, but she had got into a terrible muddle and had lost her fairy crown, her wand and her necklace (these were all craftily hidden in the garden beforehand).

She then asked the children to help her find them and then help her do some magic to find the fairies again. The children then enthusiastically went into the garden to search for the objects. I made sure to have the last one round the side of the house, and as we were finding it, my husband hid the pieces for the next activity.  

Once the wand, crown and necklace had been found, Sparkle asked the children to find the next clue to make magic. I had made a puzzle of a picture of the wendy house in the garden and we hid the puzzle pieces for the children to find (I put the children’s names on them so that each child was in charge of one piece). Once they pieced together the puzzle and worked out the picture, they went to look in the wendy house which held a letter from the fairy queen and her ‘wand’ (one of these confetti wands you get for weddings, which shoot up biodegradable bits of coloured paper into the air).

The letter asked the children to gather a variety of things (gold stones painted beforehand, flower of various colours, etc.). Once these had been gathered, the children stood in a circle and Sparkle asked them to sing a magic song: ‘If you want to help the fairies, clap your hands...’ etc. I had collected all the objects the children had gathered in a basket with a doily on the bottom, beneath which was an envelope. I had the children say some magic words and we waved the wand to create ‘fairy dust’.

The envelope magically appeared in the basket and it said that the baby fairies were so exhausted, they were sleeping on my daughter’s bed. The children rushed inside to find them. I had made one baby fairy for each child to take home as follows: I ordered cheap plastic little dolls (the ones with eyes that blink and movable joints), about an inch high, from a craft catalogue. I used lace to wind round them to make a bodice and three layers of pink net circles with a small hole in the middle to make skirts. I stuck on a pair of paper butterfly wings (I bought these in a pack but you could easily make them), and make twinkly shoes by dipping their feet in glue then glitter and a glitter halo on each little head. 

The whole ‘game’ took about half an hour and the children really enjoyed it. Especially when Sparkle asked them to each look after a fairy at the end. It was just the right age: they were totally prepared to suspend disbelief and buy into the story, and yet old enough to follow instructions. 

The food Star-shaped sandwiches and ‘fairy’ cakes. For the birthday cake my mom-in-law and I made a variation on a cake from Debbie Brown’s ‘Enchanted party cakes’ which had two toadstool houses with fairies on and around them. I served the food in party boxes with a fairy theme and had flower-fairy napkins to go with them. The juice had star-shaped ice-cubes. 

Craft activity After the children had eaten, they could, if they wanted, make a bed for their newfound fairy. I bought giant-sized matchboxes and supplied lace and material oddments for cutting out blankets, etc. 

Party bags I went to quite a lot of effort with these. I bought sparkly gift bags and made a personalised label for each on my PC. I devised some fairy labels using clipart and stuck these to bottles of bubble mixture, calling them ‘fairy wishes’. I also personalised some tiny notebooks with each child’s name on a label, e.g. ‘Anne’s Fairy Notebook’. I bought tiny fairy stampers and some fairy stickers for each bag.

As I was devising the fairy adventure game, I wrote down my ideas and then ended up turning it into a story. I took photos beforehand of the crown and wand, for example, and the baby fairies, and scanned them to illustrate the story. Thus each child got a little 8-page book to take home with the story of Sparkle and the baby fairies, a story that they had participated in. (Luckily everything went to plan and the story ended up mirroring the events closely enough!) 

Cost The most expensive part of the party was having the books colour photocopied. I limited the number of at the party to ten girls which helped keep the cost down. The cake, although I made it myself, was quite expensive given the amount of modelling paste I used to make the fairies and decorate it. I already had most of the materials for the fairy adventure bits and pieces in my craft collection at home. A lot of things I could have done more cheaply, for example printing the books in black and white instead of colour and using paper bags instead of gift bags.

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