D.I.Y. Birthday Crowns

So this Saturday is our nieces' first birthday. Yay! And as every little girl in the world her theme is princesses. Specifically Cinderella. So Erika and I decided to volunteer to decorate for her party. I have to admit that at first we were so excited and had so many ideas going through our heads. Then the next day reality hit. Holy crap it's a lot of work! So I want to begin by writing that yes you can save a lot of  $$$  But it is a lot of work and takes patience especially for first timers  as ourselves. So think about that before you begin. I do love the people that do it though because you put your heart into making it one of a kind. So today in a series of D.I.Y. posts we will be posting, to follow the theme of princesses we are making paper crown party hats.
 

To begin we bought 4 sheets of large poster paper. 2 in blue and 2 in gold. We bought them at .99 cents each at Micheals craft store. The template for the crown we borrowed (*wink *wink) from our local Burger King. Thank you. It was the easiest design and we chose this because it also has slits on one side so any child can adjust the size of the crown. We bough these cute sparkling foam stickers at .79 cents each to add a little sparkle to the girls crowns and a silver marker to write and outline for the boys crowns.

 

Step 1: Trace the outline of the crowns on the poster . We managed to make four crowns out of one poster each. So we had sixteen crowns in total. Two extra from what we were told are expected at the party. Always make sure how many you need before you begin your projects or at least an estimate.







Step 2: Cut out the crowns and this is where you are going to need a little patience and a steady hand. Also a good pair of sharp scissors come in handy too. Remember we were able to get 4 crowns out of each poster board.

Step 3: This is the tricky part. Cut slits into the newly cut crown so the crown can be adjusted based on who wears it. Be careful. There is a tool to make this easier, but we used a regular box cutter we had and overlapped the crown we used to trace. The slits were already cut so we just used those slits as a guide. Also put something underneath so you won't damage any furnishings.

Step 4:This is where it gets fun start outlining the blue crown. You can make any designs you like. Just make sure you have a clean space and an open area to draw and move your hand swiftly and with ease. Remember once you made a mistake on this silver on blue crown its going to be hard to fix or erase.

And that's it! These are our finished outlined crowns. I Just wrote My 1st Birthday on each. I'm sorry I didn't photograph my nephews crown. His crown says "Big Brother" It's great because you can customize each one or have with the name of each child on each one . The possibilities are endless!










   

Now for the girls crowns we wanted to keep it simple since the paper was already a pretty gold color. We just added the sparkling foam stickers to accent each crown. We used the same marker to write the same as we did for the boys crowns and easy to do. At the bottom are to pics of me and how they would look like on. Sorry didn't have any make-up and my hair. (Never mind) Back to the crowns. So here are our ideas on how to make easy crowns and use them for party hats. More importantly we hope they help you save some money. In total for this project we spent about  $6.00 dollars! Now I don't know about you, but I think that's pretty great! Until next time!