My Parties: How to Style a Back to School Mini Celebration

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Each year, I create a little “hooray, your first day back to school is over” celebration for my twins. This year was no different, except I discovered that morning my printer was out of color ink, which meant no free printables for me. Boo hiss. I had collected 31 sets of free back to school printables and only had enough ink for one “first day of school” sign. I also needed to put this together very quickly and spend money only on the cupcakes. I felt like Barney on “How I Met Your Mother” — “challenge accepted!”

Celebrate the end of the first day back to school Back to School Mini Party by Double the Fun Parties

All I knew in the morning was that I would make a table runner by taping together lined school paper. And that meant it was time to run around the house, looking for anything school-like. I grabbed our American Girl Doll school desk and declared it a cupcake stand. (While the top slants a bit, it was easy to anchor the cupcake wrappers to the desk top with a glue dot.)

Back to school party decorated wtih school supplies by Double the Fun Parties

Next I headed to my birthday party kit stash. I pulled out my Junie B. Jones party kit, knowing I’d find red, yellow and blue party elements. Perfect!

Don’t be a party hoarder, but DO keep select leftovers. You’ll use them again.

If they are a solid color, I promise you will find another use for them! In my tote, I found:

Giant blue pencil
Red tissue fringe
Red, yellow and blue paper link chain
Starbucks Frappuccino bottles
Party hats in primary colors
Red frame
Yellow cocktail napkins
Yellow cupcake liners
Red striped straws

Next, I raided the girls’ school supplies: glue stick, scissors and more lined paper to the rescue! The finishing touch was my collection of red glass Avon Cape Cod plates.

Back to school party in primary colors by Double the Fun Parties

Wrapping the Starbucks bottles could not be easier. It takes some scrubbing to get the sticky off the bottle after you peel off the labels, so just don’t. Instead, use the sticky as glue. My tissue stuck to the sticky label residue and all I had to do was cut it to fit. The straw flags are just more lined school paper attached with thin glue dots.

Back to school party using Starbucks Frappuccino bottles as milk bottles by Double the Fun Parties

After our morning back to school photos, I trimmed down the girls’ photo prop and popped it in the red frame. (Sometimes, the models are not cooperative.)

Honestly, the most time consuming project was folding and trimming the lined paper to decorate the bottom of the party hats, and even that was easy. I folded the paper kind of like a fan but overlapped each layer. Then I cut the paper into strips and used glue stick to adhere each layer to the hat, overlapping and folding into a curve as I went. Once all the strips were glued on, I trimmed off any pokey-out edges.