A Wicked Oz-some Birthday

Last weekend was Cookie Monster's Wizard of Oz Spa Birthday Tea Party.

(whew! that's a mouthful!)

Thankfully, the group of girls we had over are totally Oz-some and sweet

and had a super time together.

Always looking for ways to cut the waste of these parties, a few ideas came to mind.

We decorated our dining room with these classic and reusable decorations:

a golden garland for the Yellow Brick Road and

and these little spiral doo-hickies that resembled tornadoes.

We also pulled out a few Thanksgiving decorations like a scarecrow and a pumpkin for a little flare.


The tea was the best part of the party.  Listening to the girls sitting and chatting, while taking turns serving each other melted my heart and brought a big goofy smile to my face.

Around here, we enjoy our teas.  Each year, when we celebrate our family's special events at a locally owned tea house, we pick up an item or two to add to our tea service at home.  So our small stirring spoons, serving ware, and tiered stand came in handy for our party. 

Since we keep our gatherings intimate, we only needed four place settings at our table.  I decided to gather dinnerware from the thrift stores, not only because it was more economical when i caught a 50% of dishes at Goodwill, but also it would cut down on waste (we're just donating the items back to the thrift now that we're done with them.)  More importantly, it made the party a bit more special--it's always exciting to use grown up plates and glasses when you're a kid, eh?

The mismatched plates and fancy pants glasses i found for 50 cents a piece.  I found adorable floral cloth napkins that we will be saving for everyday.  Who can't use more cloth napkins, eh?  We used was Cookie's Great Grandmother's silverware.

I found a milk glass vase for $4 that served a tropical fruit salad with style.  They also dined on scones with homemade jam and homemade lemon curd, grapes, and devilled eggs that we served on the 3 tier serving rack lined with thrift plates from my china collection.

A sweet little etched glass dish ($1 at the thrift)  was filled with marshmellows, resembling lumps of sugar for they girls' hot chockie "tea" that we served in this green drangonfly teapot that we already had. 

We had these cute little espresso cups in our china cabinet that we used as "tea" cups.  Thankfully, one of Cookie's friends has family from England, so she showed the everyone how to pour tea properly.

They played some Twister

The main event at our party was making personal care items which doubled as party favours.  We made bath salts and sugar scrub with household items.  Our tricky project was making lip balm.  We sourced the materials from a company online called The Sage.  They had a vegan lip balm base and we ordered a couple different flavourings for the lip balm, which we also used in the salts.  The girls made a lip balm for their moms and themselves, which left half of a jar for us to use in our Christmas gifts this year.

Mixing up some sugar scrub

We made these funky labels for our spa goodies which we packaged in recycled jars.

"Dorothy's Bath Salts...guaranteed to melt your troubles away."

"Toto's Sugar Scrub...makes you wag your tail."

and "Frankly, It's Lip 'Baum'".

Yeah, i know that last one was a stretch, but we just couldn't help ourselves. :)

I also knitted face clothes for the girls from some cotton yarn i had in my stash.

Cookie made labels for the bags from large gift tags stamped with characters from Oz...she decided that if her friends were clever enough, they could reuse them as bookmarks. :)

And just like that, we had a fancy little tea party, building great memories with friends, and without a lot of fuss or items filling up our trash bin!