Color Me Happy - WAM Fundraiser Party

When the Wichita Art Museum (WAM) reached out about doing a children's party for their party collection fundraiser, I knew we could come up with something fun. I had recently purchased Darcy Miller's Celebrate Everything book at that time and it ended up having the perfect inspiration - a color party! I started pulling together ideas and decided to go with "Color Me Happy" as the event title. I wanted it to be bright, happy and full of color. It was time to start brainstorming activites, food and party supplies to pull it all together.

My first bright idea for the event after coming up with the theme, was to involve my talented friend, Sally Cavanaugh. She is a local photographer and we always have so much fun working together. I knew she would help make it great! With her help, we added photo mini sessions to the event for the children attending. We wanted to make sure we had a great backdrop for the photos. We took inspiration from a party Sally's friend threw and one of my favorite blogs, Oh Happy Day. We decided to cover the white wall in our space with balloons of all shapes, sizes and colors. Oh Happy Day has a great DIY. It's a fun backdrop for parties and you can do it in so many different ways.

We also had some fun with balloons bringing the WAM's famous Chihuly glass masterpiece to our small space. Since it was a fundraiser for WAM, I wanted to incorporate it into the event. We mixed different sizes of regular latex balloons. We then added long latex balloons that we curled to give the Chihuly impact. We followed The House that Lars Built tutorial on "How to Curl a Balloon." Worked well! It became a great centerpiece for the event that screamed color and WAM.

For the party supplies and table setting, I wanted to give a rainbow effect by color blocking. We decided to focus on six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Meri Meri, one of our favorite party supply vendors, sent us plates and napkins that worked with our color scheme. We laid them out across the large white table and it was just the impact we wanted! Next to the place settings, I added a mini water bottled with a simple color label. In the center of the table, I purchased flowers in the six colors and color blocked them across four vases. To keep the impact, we made sure to keep our colors in the specific order with all of our color blocking.

For food, we decided to serve sweets and snacks. The gorgeous cupcakes were made by a local favorite, Hannah Marko with HB Cakes. She followed the color scheme and I love how she played with the different frosting styles. They were a perfect addition across our table. For the snacks, we used clear plastic cups to show the color blocking:

Red - Strawberries

Orange - Goldfish Crackers

Yellow - Pineapple

Green - Grapes

Blue - Blueberries

Purple - Grapes

Outside of the photo mini sessions with Sally, we needed other activities to keep the kids busy during the event. Keeping with the color theme, we created a coloring station and candy/cereal necklace making station. They were perfect color party activities because we could color block the supplies and it added to the decor. It took a little effort to sort out the crayons, cereal and candy, but the impact was great. For our other activity, we worked with another local favorite, Wendi with Sweet Sugarlicious.  I wanted kids to be able to make their own little cookie art pieces and Wendi was able to bring it to life with Paint Your Own (PYO) cookies. Using a cookie icing pallet, they were able to dip their brush in water and paint on the cookie canvas. They had a great time and it was fun seeing their cookies come to life!

Photos via Sally Cavanaugh

Thank you to everyone that attended our fun, colorful event! We had so much fun bringing this party to life and your excitement made it all worth it. Also, thank you so much to my team for helping blow up lots of balloons and putting it all together. Thank you to Sally for helping put together the balloon wall and capturing the event so well. I should also give a special shout out to my husband that hung our balloon Chihuly and my mother that came to help finish setup.

Lots of Love,