I had so much fun throwing this pink and yellow lemonade themed party for my little girl!! I tried to create a fun table scape as inexpensively as possible without making it look cheap or tacky.

Here’s how I did it!

Invitation:  My husband helped me design these darling invitations.  I’m a little OCD about keeping things consistent for parties so everything had to coordinate.

Decorations:

Candlesticks: I bought one candlestick from the dollar store, the other 3 I got from the thrift store.  The most expensive one was $1.50, and one of them wasn’t even a candlestick, it was a lamp base!

Next, I primed them all with white and then used $0.59 acrylic paint to paint them.  They each took a few layers but it was really easy.

  

Tissue Rosette Balls:  I found this awesome tutorial at The Idea Room.  Like I said earlier, I wanted to do this as inexpensively as possible, so purchasing styrofoam balls in the sizes I wanted wasn’t an option.  I brainstormed with my mom and sisters and came up with bunching a ton of old newspaper (we store old ones until we have enough to warrant a trip to the recycling plant, so we had quite a supply available) into balls.  I bunched them as tightly as I could and then duct taped them to hold them together.  They certainly weren’t perfectly round, but they were pretty darn close, and even better, they were free!

Then I followed the tutorial and covered them in tissue rosette balls.

Boxes: I wrapped different sized boxes I had around my house in yellow and pink zebra wrapping paper, stacked them, and served desserts on them.

Labels:  My husband designed the labels for all the food.

• Pink Lemonade Labels
• Lemonade Labels
• Cupcake and Lemon Bar Labels

Backdrop: 

The backdrop had several steps. First I bought 6 foam boards from the dollar store and wrapped them in the same yellow and pink zebra wrapping paper.

I punched holes in the bottoms and tops to hang them and to connect them to a base so if it was windy (which it was the day of the party) they wouldn’t be all over the place.  I tied them together with pink ribbon.

Next, I created the frames for the pictures using materials from around the house.  We save up cardboard boxes of cereal etc to recycle, so my husband made the frame pattern for me and then I cut them out of some large cereal boxes.  Then  I wrapped them in the pink zebra wrapping paper.  Then I taped the 8×10 pictures of my daughter on the frames and hot glued the frames to the yellow wrapped boards.

Finally, I made the monograms.  This was quite time consuming but I was thrilled with how they turned out.  Each monogram took about an hour and a half to make.  I’m sure there is a faster way, I just haven’t figured it out yet.  I found a darling free font, Blessed Day and had my husband manipulate it a little in illustrator to the size I wanted.  I made three copies, cut them out and then made tiny tissue rosettes and glued them to the paper pattern.  Needless to say, I had a few hot glue burns by the time I finished! Then I glued them to the pink zebra wrapped boards.

Food:

Pink and Yellow Lemonade: I wanted to do cute individual servings but not spend a lot of money, so I used mini water bottles, dumped out the water, added the lemonade, changed the label, and popped in the striped paper straws.  The water bottles cost about $2.50 for all of them.

Pink Lemonade Cupcakes:   I love the way they looked but I don’t love the recipe I used so I am now on the lookout for a yummy pink lemonade cake. If anyone knows of one, please share!!

Lemon Bars: One of my good friends doesn’t like lemon bars, but she tried these and loved them!  I cut them into small squares and served them in mini cupcake wrappers that were spread out a little.  You can find the recipe here.

Ramen Chicken Salad:  I forgot to take a picture of this but it was delicious!  I found the recipe here.  I was a little worried about the amount of oil but it really wasn’t too much.  I did make one change though, I waited to put the ramen noodles on until right before serving so that they would add a nice crunch to the salad.  It worked out great!  The salad was a huge hit and several people actually ended up putting them on rolls and eating it like a sandwich. Yum!

Fruit Tray and Rolls:  Not too much to say about this.  For the fruit tray you could try to stick to the pink and yellow theme by serving watermelon, strawberries, pineapple and/or bananas.  It ended up being kind of a last minute add on so I didn’t plan that out as well.