Because friends don't let friends drink friends...

How I threw my favorite 13 year old girl the perfect "Twilight" Birthday party...

Start with awesome after Christmas sale goodies in the colors of the Twilight books...
All of the above was purchased at Hobby Lobby's 80-90% off after Christmas Sale and the Dollar Store, where who knew it but you can get some items for fifty cents...go figure...

Once you have all of the decorating goodies, we to found the "perfect" location for the party...in this case it was a Historic Library that had a very aged feel that for our theme





We were creative...with such a BIG room we new we would not be able to "fill" it with decorations so we concentrated on making sure our table centerpiece's were awesome... I spent a few hours making up super cool label's for empty wine bottles to sit in the middle of the table..I thought they came out good and since I pasted them on empty bottles of Boones Farm the whole project cost me $2.00 per bottle...and no I did not drink the Boones Farm nor did we give it to the kiddos... although I will admit as crappy as Boones is it may have made the whole project much more interesting!


It's hard when they turn 13 to come up with "goody's" for the kids to take home, the usual bag of candy and dollar store items just wouldn't do, so instead M and I made some really cool bookmarks, using a picture from the Twilight movie and quotes from the books written in the different characters handwriting/font





We also made our own Twilight pins, I have seen these on sale EVERYWHERE and of course I wasn't going to buy one for each kid, so making our own seemed the next logical/frugal thing to do..it was pretty cool and we threw silver glitter in each pin to give it an extra special something. You can get the pins here and they are super easy to use... I found a template online and we designed a few different options




To go along with my idea to heavily decorate the tables I wrapped all of the "red" plastic silverware in black napkins and hot glued a red "napkin ring" made from some wired ribbon I picked up at the dollar store, it was a pain in the butt, but it did look decent when we set up the tables at the site...

I also thought it would be cool to have some candle light, but probably not to smart to have actual candles burning so instead we opted to turn down the chandeliers and place "bleeding candles" on each of the tables. This was probably the easiest coolest thing to do! All it took is a pack of dollar store white pillar candles and another small red votive candle that I dripped all over the white tapers...





So anyway here's pictures of the event pretty much put together, thank god for my right hand girlie Liz for being smart enough to take pics of everything put together before the kids got there as I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off ( oh and she helped set up and keep me company along with some other kick butt friends, aren't I lucky!)


This was the gift table...Aren't those candelabras the coolest!! Day after Halloween at Cracker Barrel I swear I had my eye on them all through the Halloween season but $39.99 was waaayyyy to much but on sale for $4 and they were mine!!! They rocked!! ( We did fix the tablecloth after the pic was taken!)


A close up of one of the centerpiece's..there was all kinds of stuff in there...black and red sequined Christmas balls, all kinds of red & black jewel "scatters", sequined red apples, red ribbon, and tufts of red, black and silver tulle all bunched up underneath, I loved it!






This was the original circulation desk from the library and it made an awesome buffet for the party!!!!



And just maybe somehow Maddy got a copy of the movie "Twilight" for Christmas...you know waaayyyy before it came out on DVD and while it was still in theaters...so yeah she was the envy of her friends and we were lucky enough to get ahold of a projector and have the movie playing during the party...a lot of the kiddos were glued to the movie! I guess it pays to know someone who may have been in a far away country for waayyy to long and could get ahold of movies before they were released...


We didn't want to spend money on a DJ...so we went with an IPOD and a IPOD player, a few days ahead of M and I sat down and made up a very cool playlist...I was going to go hokey and include things such as Monster Mash, but I thought that would just be hokie so I stuck with what M and her friends listen to, it did turn out pretty good and we did get the kids moving and dancing!
OH AND DID I MENTION...WE HAD A KNIGHT!!!!!

Our good friend Scott is crazy enough to have a full suit of armor and was cool enough to get dressed in this ridiculously hot (even when it's 23 degrees out) get up and guard/welcome M and her guests! He was really great at keeping the paparazzi away...see....

All in all it was a fantastic night and I was super proud of what a wonderful hostess M is, she mingled well and made sure she spread her time among all of her guests, that's hard to do especially at 13!! Way to go my baby I am so proud of what an amazing young woman you have turned into! I hope you had as much fun as I did... are you ready to start planning your Sweet 16...just kidding I am definitely not in any hurry to do that~





PS- God help me but I am throwing a Double Birthday/Toga Party for some good friends in February...it should be interesting