Mermaid Under the Sea 4th Birthday Party with Free Printable

Miss Matilda knew exactly what kind of birthday party she wanted this year……..Mermaid Under the Sea. She said the birthday was for all mermaids, not just Ariel (the Little Mermaid), but that she could come too. She said all mermaids and sea creatures were welcome. She’s an inclusive type of little girl.

Matilda’s birthdays are always so fun because she is a July birthday (just like me), so we can have her parties outside! As I shared with you yesterday, we used her mermaid birthday outfit as a jumping off point for the party decor, but tried to stick with pink and blue as per the birthday girl’s request.

I had this old frame sitting in my studio that I bought for 25 cents at our local thrift shop. I used a piece of burlap that I already had around from when I made some Burlap Covered Lamp Shades a year or so ago. I taped the burlap to the back of the empty frame. Then I took a star fish that my mother-in-law had brought the kids back from the beach and hand sewed it around the center to the burlap. I love how this turned out. Rustic and beachy………and less than $1.00!

I found a lot of the party decor at the Dollar Tree store. I bought a bunch of bags of glass beads that are meant to go inside of vases for the table. My intention was that they would look like sea glass. I bought some bags in aqua blue and some in a mixture of blues and greens.

I have about a gazillion mason jars around the house, so I grabbed one of my favorite blue ones and filled it with sand and some seas shells.

I took a hurricane vase that usually has pinecones inside it and filled it will sand and put more seashells on top. I purchased the bags of seashells also from the Dollar Tree store. Who knew they had so much beachy decor?

These were little striped favor boxes with a seashell foam sticker added to the front of them that I used to serve pirates booty for the kids. It seems like all the kids love that stuff!

My husband gave me a hard time about these because he said they looked like jello shots. But I found these little cups and just thought they were the perfect size for kids jello at a party. I filled the blue cups with blue raspberry jello and set them on top of brown sugar (to look like sand).

Here is the fruit that we served. I just called it ‘Paradise Fruit Salad’ because that sounded beachy and mermaid-like to me. The shell of the pineapple was kept together to use it as kind of a boat for the fruit salad. My mom (Grandma Jane) who was visiting from Texas helped me with this one. Isn’t it pretty?

I was pretty excited about this little food project. We took two vanilla wafer cookies, spread strawberry frosting on each side and put a yogurt raisin in the middle to look like an oyster with a pearl inside. I just thought these were so cute. We also drew some lines with a blue frosting gel pen on top of the cookies to look kind of like a shell. So fun!

I made some rice krispie treats and cut them out in the shape of fish. Our little guy, Caspian, could not get enough of these!

We picked up some wraps from Costco and called them ‘Seaweed Sprials’. You could definitely make these yourself, but sometimes I just like to make my life a little easier and go with a few store-bought items.

The girls picked out these chocolate gold coins at the party store. They chose pink and blue and one orange one for the birthday girl. I told them to count out 30 to put in their bag. When I gave them to the cashier and told him I didn’t know exactly how many they got……..it turns out 30 turned into 73. Oh well…….we are rich in chocolate around here!

Little brother had to put is three fingers in the cake………do you see his finger marks in the picture above. That guys loves his sweets, so I guess he couldn’t wait for cake. Oh brother.