Vintage Circus Birthday Party | Colorful Kid’s Birthday Party | Geneva Party Planner Florist

August 26, 2014

Aria’s Vintage Circus 2nd Birthday was held at the perfect location–an old bear cage-turned picnic shelter at Fabyan Park in Geneva, Illinois. Talk about a cool venue! Once the venue was set the creative juices started to flow resulting in a bunch of fabulous Circus Party ideas some of which I’ve never seen before! All of these amazing photos are by Jennifer Kaye Photography.

Key features would include the venue of course–it might be the only park in the world that has an old bear cage that was turned into a picnic shelter! We decorated it to the nines with bunting banners, balloons, signs, posters and lots of circus-themed paraphernalia.

Once we had the venue and theme nailed down, I designed a custom invitation inspired by a vintage circus poster. I used a primary color palette, bold outlines, vintage fonts, banners, dot patterns and distressing techniques to make it look more like the screen-printed signs of yesteryear even though it was all done digitally. I was even able to do an illustration of the birthday girl, “Ringmaster Aria”, that inspired the ringmaster outfit I later sewed for her for the party.

Other highlights would be the vintage ‘circus’ drums, including a huge base drum that was the centerpiece of the main table with some smaller drums repurposed as stands for cakes and cupcakes. There were also a bunch of very successful DIY projects including a light up “A” marquee letter and a handmade paper mache “circus bear” that perfectly matched the bear on the circus poster invitations.

Large banner signs, bunting banners, and smaller signs decorated the inside and outside of the bear cage shelter. Red and white striped tablecloths topped all of the tables along with buckets of peanuts and brightly colored floral arrangements in antique Barnum’s Animal Cracker tins. We had a variety of sweets and treats including cookies with vintage circus art on them (which I painstakingly made myself!), a bunch of varieties of popcorn, peanuts, circus peanuts, cotton candy, saltwater taffy, cupcakes, and oodles of other yummy candies. Picnic-style foods including potato salad, hotdogs, “Acro-brats”, hamburgers and fried chicken rounded out the menu choices and lemonade, juice boxes, soda pop and good ol’ ice water were the beverage offerings. There were also some non-edible “prizes” for the kids that included Play-doh minis and little circus rubber duckies.

Activities and games included “Pin the Nose on the Clown”, “Color-Your-Own Circus Poster”, “Design-Your-Own Clown Hat” and a face makeup area. Many of the kids were turned into clowns or circus animals by their parents. There was also a faux photo booth area in part of the bear cage—with signs that read “Do Not Feed the Animals” and “BEWARE Animals may Bite”. Kids of all ages could be seen standing behind the bars of the cage for a photo op. It was very cute!

The guest-of-honor, “Ringmaster Aria”, wore a handmade ringmaster jacket and red sparkle shoes. She had a small black top hat designed but I ended up wearing it instead as it is very hard to get a 2-year-old to wear anything on their head for very long. I also made a little wooden person cake topper with the exact same outfit on for her birthday cake and she loved it!

Aria’s Vintage Circus 2nd Birthday Party was amazing and everyone LOVED it and had a great time! I was so happy to find a venue that inspired me to create such a magical experience for everyone especially my wonderful daughter!

And below are some photos of some of the details as I was working on them (my apologies for the photos!)
Some of my favorite projects included the wooden cake topper “Ringmaster Aria”, the signs for the candy buffet and the DIY Marquee Letter “A” that I made with the help of my husband!

Circus Ticket-style invitations that I made with custom illustrations of my daughter and some animals!

Just my luck they actually came out with vintage circus poster stamps this summer! How awesome are these?

Below are the maps I made for the invitations!

Here is the outside of the Bear Cage shelter!

More details…
Posters/signage I made

The Ringmaster costume I sewed/designed with hat by RBK Creations.

Cookies I made (baked and cut out the cookies, iced them, and painstakingly applied the wafer paper circus clip art!)

Finished marquee letter lit up; circus posting coloring page; vintage circus drum sign

FORM Event Chicago | Floral Art Show | Naperville Event Florist

April 26, 2014

In April we participated in FORM: Art + Floral which was an awesome exhibition at Room 1520 showcasing a 14 floral designers doing interpretations of 14 pieces of artwork. It was a fun creative challenge and it raised money for a great cause (Snow City Arts). We will definitely do this show again next year too!

Below you can see the poster/invitation I designed as well as the collage mixed media art piece I was assigned and my floral interpretation of it. It was hard to come up with a concept–but most of my idea started with the bird images I saw in the artwork and then I thought of the idea of cutting ti leafs into feathers and my idea (literally) bloomed from there!

Photos by Jennifer Kathryn Photography

Children’s Book Baby Shower | Featured on ON TO BABY! | Naperville Wedding Florist

April 7, 2014

We are SO happy to announce that the beautiful Children’s Book Baby Shower we did for our past couple Missy + Dan is featured on the ON TO BABY blog today! Take a look at how fabulous it is and PLEASE leave a comment on the blogpost, Pin it and share on Facebook!!! We are SOO proud of this one! Make sure to read the full story about this shower on On To Baby today!!!

Vendors:
Flowers, Props, Invitations, Games, Banners, Event Design & Coordination: Kio Kreations
Photography: Hazelton Photography
Venue: Cress Creek Country Club
Cookie Favors: Chris’ Creative Confections
Cupcakes: Chicago Cupcake

So many details! I made banners, table numbers, pockets, game cards and of course beautiful flower arrangements! There were vintage toys, blocks and lots of fun natural materials too…it was sheer perfection!!!

Please enjoy some more amazingness below…and you have to check out Chris’ Creative Confections and Chicago Cupcake. Perfect for showers, parties, weddings–and really any and every event you have!!!

Want to see another beautiful Children’s Book themed baby shower? We did the same theme for MY baby shower almost 2 years ago–it is featured on Hostess with the Mostess here!

Featured on Hostess with the Mostess Blog | Enchanted Forest 1st Birthday | Naperville Event Florist

November 15, 2013

We are so happy to have another wonderful event featured on the Hostess with the Mostess blog! This time it was my daughter’s amazing Enchanted Forest First Birthday Party! So many fun details to see–make sure to check out the full post here!

I made all of the paper items including the fun invitations and assorted signage. I also sewed Aria’s dress and made all of the felt animal masks. I also created a ball toss game and “favor station” for the kiddos to enjoy. The “Grandma’s”, my aunt & cousin and I made most of the food (but we catered the main entrees from Q BBQ and Brown’s Chicken & Pasta) and of course we also made the lovely flower arrangements! All of these details came together to make a magical enchanted party for my awesome little one-year-old!

Art Class with Cassie | Private Art Lessons | Naperville Art Teacher

May 15, 2013

I just started private art lessons with a new almost 10-year old student and art entusiast named Cassie. I’ve missed having an artist to guide in all things art so I was so glad that her mom contacted me. We’ve been busy doing some drawing fundamentals stuff in the first few classes we’ve had thus far.

The first day of class we worked on Pattern Development. I thought this would be a fun way to learn techniques while experimenting with all of the new art supplies I had her get for class. She got some “artist quality” colored pencils, a graphite pencil set ranging from 2H to 6B, a kneaded eraser (which might be her favorite thing as she sculpted it into a cat shape), blending stumps, a sketchbook, a bristol board pad, and a nice pen set (ranging from 005 to 08mm). She will never go back to lame kid’s school supplies for drawing again!

The second class we focused on Shading Techniques such as hatched line, cross-hatch, scribble, and learned how to create smooth gradients. We also delved into complimentary colors and how combining them creates a nice dark color which works great for shading. I made worksheets for all of these things so she could work on finishing them up at home. We only have an hour together a week so we usually don’t finish everything in class, but she always understands the concepts enough to complete them outside of class and bring them back to me the following week. I am really proud of her! She is a great artist!

I also made a worksheet for Cassie to further focus on Shading Techniques using a series of circles and a “light source” to determine where the highlight and shadow would fall on the ball/sphere. Cassie used graphite and a blending stump for these–I think she did a great job!

We also did some good old Still Life Drawing with some fresh white roses and vases I had at the studio. I shined an OTT-light at the vases to cast a shadow for the drawing and dimmed half of the overhead lights so there was more contrast on the still life. My work is the featured below with Cassie’s so you can get a better idea for the exercise. The first still life of the 3 flower vases we started with fine, faint, hard (2H) pencil lines to get down the shapes of the vases and flowers. Then we went in with some stronger, thicker, softer (HB, 2B, etc.) pencils and accented edges, emphasized shapes and contours, adding some shading, etc. We finished the pieces by adding some colored pencil accents. I love how they turned out!

After completing our still life exercise, we then worked on Couture Line Drawing techniques–which Cassie found challenging at first (as did I many years ago!) You can get the general feel from hers that it is a rose in a vase so I had her practice this technique more in her sketchbook as her “art homework”. As a result of the at-home practice she is getting better and better at contour line!

If you are interested in any of these worksheets, please leave me a message on this blogpost and I can email them to you. I have 2 pattern worksheets, the shading/light source ball worksheet, and the 2 ball/cube shading/line technique sheets. All featured in the projects above.

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