The Lorax Party.

I think this is going to be a fairly disappointing post.
I have very few pictures.
I actually didn't take ANY pictures during the party. Not one. Luckily our friend Christine called me on it and snapped a few for me. I really was busy enjoying the moments with Annabelle...which is how it should be, right?

Anyway.

This party was fun to do. I Pinterested a lot, but came up with a few of my own ideas, too. It would have been MORE fun to do if I hadn't waited until, oh, two weeks before the party to start figuring everything out. Ahh well...you live you learn, right?

Here are the photos I do have (some taken very poorly with my phone after the party was over), and I'll try to talk about the rest without photos.

Here's the invitation, thanks to an awesome Etsy purchase:

Thankfully, I had a bunch of 5x7 envelopes left over from various Christmas cards and Belle's birth announcement, so I didn't have to buy any. Woot!

One of the coolest parts of the decorations was the awesome Once-ler that Jason made. 

This is the scene from the movie that he based it off of:

...and this is the one that he made with scrap wood, rubber gloves, cement, and paint. We had it propped up on the porch with a table next to it, asking for the party entrance fee. I found the buckets for the nails, 15 cents, and shells in the Target dollar aisle, and they even had the handy chalk board part already on them. Score! We bought a bag of craft shells from Hobby Lobby, and scrounged around our house for money to make 15 cents, and also some old nails, in case people didn't bring their own party entrance "fee."

I have to say, I was actually TOTALLY disappointed that this was basically ignored as people came in, lol. It was pretty much my favorite part of the decor. Only two people actually "paid" the Once-ler. Oh well.

This is the poem that I came up with, and I downloaded the free Dr. Soos font to use. It's printed on plain white cardstock and framed in a black plastic Dollar Store frame. 

All of the rest of the decor was outside. save for a few tissue paper balls inside by the food. It was, unfortunately, a zillion degrees outside the day of the party, so the outside stuff was short lived. Which...was the whole party. But, I don't blame the guests--it was crazy hot outside. 

In this photo below, you can see the Truffula Trees that I made. I got the idea on Pinterest, but tweaked it a bit to make it "better," in my opinion. I used black foam pipe insulation from Home Depot for the trunks. Inside the trunks are PVC pipe to help them stand up straight. Then I used white duct tape to make various sized stripes on the trees. On the top are tissue-paper balls that are tied to the insulation with pipe cleaners. I made 13 of them, and they were up against the fence and around the tent that the kids' tables were under. Our intention was to hammer the PVC pipe into the ground so they would stand on their own, but the ground was seriously harder than bricks thanks to the drought we've had. So, we used zip ties (from the Target dollar aisle) at the last minute to tie them to the fence and tent. I also made extra tissue paper balls and hung them from the tent. 

On the table in the photos above and below here, you can sort of see the moustaches that I made. I cut them out of yellow textured cardstock, and hot glued them to dowel rods. No one used them. lol.

These are the Truffula Trees in the Lorax. I am pretty proud of how mine turned out!

I picked up a bouquet of flowers at Meijer, and cut them off to put in small round vases at each table. Horrible photo, but you get the idea.

Food was mostly ideas from Pinterest, but a few things came out of my own brain. Unfortunately I have very few pics of the food. Here's a list of what we had:

Gluppity Glup (chocolate fountain) with Truffula Fruit (fruit and marshmallows)

Mini Truffula Trees (broccoli) and other Veggies 

Hummingfish (goldfish crackers)

Barbaloot Mix (chocolate teddy grahams and mini marshmallows)

Truffula Cupcakes

Butterfly Milk (milk in small jars with natural flavored straws to flavor the milk)

Lorax Juice (punch made of orange juice, pinapple juice, and ginger ale)

Seuss Juice (alcoholic beverages for the grownups)

Here's the spread...

These cupcakes were a pain in the @$$. I am not going to lie. The cupcakes themselves were super easy to make, and my best friend Katie (who has a hobby of cake decorating) showed me how to make them look like grass. We ordered a bunch of birch-tree patterned paper straws from Amazon (super cheap!) and used them as the trunks of the Truffula Trees. Then the tops. ohhhh the tops. We were going to borrow a cotton candy machine, and then we decided to buy one (not the massive kind, the cheap ones for home use). Making the cotton candy itself took about an hour to figure out. We ate a LOT of sugar in the process. We thought we had it down, and were decorating the cupcakes the night before. Then we realized after we had about 5 done that they were...melting. Literally. The cotton candy had basically deflated and was getting sort of soggy and sad looking. The trees looked as though they had been rained on. So we started over. And it happened again. So we started over again. We finally gave up around midnight the night before the party, and I went to bed thinking our cupcakes were going to be just grass. Lame. The next day my sister ran out to the store and bought store-bought cotton candy, thinking it would work better. We thought it was, until we realized THAT was melting, too. This was a few hours before the party. I gave up, and gave the cupcakes over to Jason and my sister to figure out. I just couldn't handle it. So, Jason saved the day and, about 20 minutes before the party started, hammered these bad boys out. By the end of the party, most of the cotton candy that was left sort of fell apart and was very, very sad looking, but who cares. Most of them were eaten by then.

The Lorax cake was my first attempt at marshmallow fondant, and it was SUPER EASY. I couldn't believe how easy it was. Yes, my child had all sorts of sugar and artificial food dye on her birthday. Part of me died a little when I was making this cake, I'm not going to lie. But, it's one day of the year that she ate it, so whatever. 

Here is the Butterfly Milk and the Seuss Juice. In the movie, they say that the tufts of the trees smell sweeter than Butterfly Milk, so that's where this idea came from. We bought Ball Mason Jars, and drilled holes into the lids. Then I picked up some rubber grommets from Lowe's and popped them into the sharp holes, and they were the perfect size to wedge the flavor straws into and also prevent much spillage. We got a butterfly shaped punch from Hobby Lobby and hot-glued a bunch of butterflies onto each jar. The flavor straws we ordered from Amazon and the kids could pick whatever flavor they wanted. 

This is the punch jar (my mom's) that the Lorax Juice was in (it was orange when it was full, so it looked like the Lorax)

 

...and this cooler was filled with just ice water. We borrowed the cooler from a neighbor (Thanks Shagra and Josh!)

Those are all the food pics I have. You can sort of see the rest of the food in the first pic of it all up a little higher. 

For activities, I divided the backyard into two sections. The Truffula Forrest was where all the Truffula Trees were, and Thneedville had a bunch of tree stumps all around (we got from a friend whose tree had been cut down), because all of the Truffula Trees were cut down to make Thneeds. I had signs designating the two sections of the yard, but I don't have pictures of them. I could probably upload the printables somehow...if you want them, shoot me a message and I'll do that for ya. Here's what they said:

Welcome to the Truffula Forest!

 Feed the brown Barbaloots marshmallows and truffula fruit, and try to catch some Hummingfish in the pond. 

Welcome to Thneedville!

In Thneedville, there are no real trees; the Once-ler cut them all down to make his Thneeds. You can decorate a Thneed (a thing everyone needs!) with Truffula tufts, or plant some seeds to bring back real plants to Thneedville. 

In the Truffula Forrest, the kiddos could go fishing for Hummingfish (printed and laminated hummingfish, and then attached magnets to them). I made the fishing poles from stick and twine, and magnets. The magnets were just a titch too weak, so sometimes it was hard to catch the fish. But, most of the kids just picked them up anyway. 

Also in the Truffula Forrest, the kids could feed the Barbaloots. Jason painted some awesome Barbaloots onto posterboard, and we covered our bags game with them. The kids could throw the balls into the holes (the Barbaloot's mouth) to feed them.

In Thneedville, there were also two activities. One was the take-home gift of planting flowers (re-purposed cans to look like the Lorax; seeds, watering cans and shovels from the Dollar Store), and the other was to decorate a Thneed.

 The sign on the flower table said this:

You are in charge of the last of the seeds. So treat them with care. Give them water and fresh air. Because...plants and trees, not Thneeds, are what everyone needs.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better—it’s not.

The Thneed decorating table had a big bowl of pom-pons on it, glue, crayons, and paper "thneeds" that I cut out. The kids had fun doing these once we moved them inside where it was cooler.

The only other thing to mention that I don't have a photo of is Annabelle's dress. I got a plain white dress from Hobby Lobby, and bought orange fabric dye and dyed it orange. I made a Lorax face on the front, and iron-ed on "I speak for the trees" on the back. Unfortunately, the dress was pretty much destroyed by the end of the party, and I have no photos. Oh well.

edit: wait! Here's one you can sort of see her dress...

Soooo...that's it! The party was fun, and we had a great turnout of family and friends. Annabelle was totally overwhelmed (in a good way) and I think everyone had a great time!