Sneak Peek: Retro Space Rocket Ships & Ray-guns Party

Wikipedia defines “Retro-Futurism” as a trend in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced prior to about 1960. Basically this coincides around the same time that The United States stopped dreaming about the future, IMO. This extremely eloquent individual seems to agree with that sentiment as well: 

I apologize to everyone if this might be coming off as a rant about ideologies, and it’s not, just the opinion of someone who still dreams big, but politics and reality keep getting in the way and won’t stop being annoying! Breathe…In through your nose, out through your mouth…3 seconds in, 3 seconds out..

Okay I have successfully “enhanced my calm” (+1 Internets to anyone who leaves a comment on what movie that quote is from). I’m going to channel my quasi-negative energies into this blog post and the resulting awesome retro-futuristic themed dessert table that will unfold before your very eyes. It does, however, still bug the crap out of me that we as a species STILL don’t have personal rocket packs. Don’t even get me started on the flying car. Alas, it was not meant to be… But you know what was? Hello My Sweet’s spectacularly Retro Rockets & Rayguns themed dessert table, that’s what!

I have to admit, I was really super excited about designing this table, so much in fact that I started to build props of rocket packs and intergalactic rocket ships before I had even finalized the design of the table. It’s like the inner kid in me came out and didn’t want to go back to adult land and actually start to shape this table into a cohesive look. After gazing upon our dessert table it’s my hope that it too will let your mind wander off and you inner child come out to play, soaring through the cosmos to dispatch evil robot villains with our rayguns, even if just for a little bit! ‘Cause if the world needs anything, it’s a little more dreaming… So after watching the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis rendition of Flash Gordon and another cult classic, 1956’s Forbidden Planet, I had plenty of ideas just swirling around my noggin. I decided upon a more retro look akin to When Worlds Collide, after a disastrous accident with the first version of my rocket ship prop/centerpiece.

As I said earlier I had finished it so early that it was just perched precariously atop our refrigerator and met with untimely death on our kitchen floor. After ditching the Flash Gordon-esque look, I eventually went with more of a traditional rocket look.

 All the awesome party details will be posted this weekend, so be sure to check back in with us! We’ll go over the printables, food and some really cool ways to keep your young party guests entertained!

Sweet Parties: Sunshine, Lollipops & Rainbows for Poppy Day!

Photography by Brooke Mayo, www.brookemayo.com

Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows… Go ahead, watch the video clip below and try not to get the song stuck in your head for like 2 weeks straight. 

If you didn’t, congratulations, you don’t have a pulse!  If you did, then you are in the same boat as us.  Judging by Ms. Poppy Day’s reaction to her fantabulous “Rainbows and Candy Land” 2nd birthday party, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Read all about her party details on her Mommy’s blog at Brooke Mayo Photographers.

Photography by Brooke Mayo, www.brookemayo.com

As I write these blog posts, I’m constantly amazed by what Microsoft Word will and will not flag as incorrect grammar and/or misspelled words.  I was totally ready for it to flag “fantabulous” as an incorrectly spelled word.  I even had Urban Dictionary’s definition ready to go just in case.  ”Sort of like “fabulous” but much more fabulous than the word “fabulous” can convey. Like supercalifragilisticexpialidocius but shorter and easier to spell.” But, I digress…

What was I talking about?  Oh yes, making the world a better place, one child’s birthday at a time.  Today’s lucky kid was none other than one Poppy Day Wright.  A cute and adorable wee little one, her smile is as infectious as that damn song that is still probably stuck in your head…  She also happens to be the daughter of one Brooke Mayo, the famous wedding photographer, and John Wright, part owner of Sanctuary Vineyards.  Totally no pressure on Hello My Sweet to not screw this up! 

The festivities surrounding her second year of existence were to encompass elements from both Mother Nature, more specifically rainbows, and from the Hasbro classic board game Candy Land.

I do realize that both of those are obscenely obscure subjects.  Luckily, for me anyway, a mash-up of rainbows and Candy Land went together much better than my last idea… nuts and gum!  Alas, I cannot take credit for this awesome idea, but +1 internets to those of you who know what I’m talking about!

Fun times…

As with almost all of our endeavors we started a Pinterest board, which you can see here.  I then set out to our local prop stores, and if you read our blog, by prop stores you know that I mean Dollar Tree and Wal-Mart.  I know what you’re thinking… But if we had a Jamali Garden, Crate & Barrel, or Hobby Lobby maybe I wouldn’t have to aim so low. ***UPDATE***  Oh snap!  Heather and I have found out that we do in fact have a Hobby Lobby in the Danville, VA area and that if it were possible to live in a department store, this would be our choice!

Any who, back to the board!  Heather and I knew that there were specific elements that we wanted to incorporate.  Heather wanted to do a ruffled crepe paper backdrop with puffy felt clouds and those ingenious rainbow colored pancakes.  Oh did I mention that this was a breakfast-slash-dessert table?  Oops, that would be my bad, as the kiddies say.  Yep, so breakfast… Pancakes, eggs, grits (it IS the south after all), biscuits, bacon (Heather will NOT accept any job unless this is present in some way), a medley of fresh fruit, fruit dip, cupcakes and one smash cake for the birthday girl.  Coffee for the ‘ol timers, orange juice for the kiddies, with mimosas and Kahlua for everyone else rounding out the menu. 

Photography by Brooke Mayo, www.brookemayo.com

For me the tough part was figuring out how to incorporate the Candy Land elements into the mix.  Tough only in that I had totally forgot about that part of the theme.  I was so engrossed in the rainbow aspect of it for some reason that I blocked out the candy. Once Heather snapped me out of it, I set to work coming up with an idea to translate the Candy Land board layout into the actual table, and figure out what to do with all these bags of candy that I had bought.  On an outing to Toys-R-Us we found a rather large tube of gumballs that we just had to have, I mean who sees a 3 foot tube of gumballs and doesn’t buy it up?  Answer honestly now.  We asked each other while in the checkout line what were we going to do with said gianormous gumball tube, and to be frank, I had absolutely no idea.  But it was ours!  MUAHAHAHAH!  Sorry, I’ve had a lot of coffee today. 

Photography by Brooke Mayo, www.brookemayo.com

Heather had come up with the winning idea of creating the “gumball tree”, expanding upon the “Rolo tree” idea for our Peafowl Christmas table.  We also incorporated some oversized candy elements as wall décor.  We hot-glued two plastic plates together, bottom sides sticking out, and wrapped them up in clear cellophane wrap.  We then cinched the ends with clear plastic zip ties, easy-peasy, instant and fun candy décor!  We did almost the identical thing to balloons on top of thick white wooden dowels for imitation suckers.  I even had a last minute stroke of genius concerning the candy decorations.  I had taken our 4 tier glass cake stand, which had hollowed out center stands, and put various candies in each of the hollowed out areas and sealed with some clear packing tape.  Here is a picture of it before any of the cupcakes were plated. 

Photography by Brooke Mayo, www.brookemayo.com

We also had a blast sticking around the party and seeing the reactions of people who found out that on the back of their utensil packet that we handmade, were individual packets of salt & pepper.  For the most part, people may not notice little details like this, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do them.  And if and when you do, someone will notice and will end up smiling…just ask Poppy.

Photography by Brooke Mayo, www.brookemayo.com

If you like the printable decorations you see pictured, they are available for purchase in our Etsy shop, with custom text for $23.

Nerf Birthday Party

Purchase the Printable Collection pictured below, click here to go to our Etsy shop!

Picking up where we left off earlier in the week, our Sneak Peek of this awesome party gave a little history on NERF Foam Blasters. Today we are going to continue with the theme and give you all the details about the party!

For the rest of the table design, I knew I was going to be working with a lot of colors, from the blasters themselves, and fairly bright ones at that.  So it was necessary to use a neutral color as our canvas.  And you can’t get any more neutral than white.

White cross huh? How convenient…

The peg boards that you see the blasters on were painted in a stark white, with the table covering also being white.  (And if anyone is interested in seeing just how those are constructed, we will be happy to do another post with a tutorial, just let us know!) The starkness of the white really contrasted with the plastic serve ware that I had found at several locations, Big Lots, Dollar General and Dollar Tree, and the colors that I was able to find were uncanny matches with the colors of the blasters themselves.  It’s as if the toy manufacturing plants had an excess of the plastic they used in the construction of NERF blasters and decided they would make plastic serving platters and beverage tubs with it.

With all the kiddies running around pegging each other with various foam darts and discs, I thought it prudent to not have as many sweets on the table and instead focus on returning some of that spent energy.  I thought it prudent to also have available some eye protection gear in the form of safety glasses.  The Pyramex Intruder Clear Frame Safety Glasses from www.discountsafetygear.com are an awesome choice, both aesthetically pleasing and a deal at only $0.89 a piece with no minimum order needed.

Hopefully the inevitable disappointment that a child might have in seeing a table full of pineapple, grapes, celery, oranges and carrots is subsided when they glance upon the large white wall of bad-assery that is to serve as the resting place for the various NERF blasters.  In addition to the fruits and veggies, we had reduced fat Cheez-Its, Snapea Crisps, 2 different flavors of energy drinks, and of course orange creamsicle cupcakes.  As I said in our last blog post, you can’t have a birthday without cake….am I right?  You can see in our awesome pictures by Heather, that the entire selection of food on the table totally matched with the two different color schemes of the blasters.  Concept design department…mission accomplished! (Totally high-fiving myself right now.)

Printable wise with this table, I had a blast.  I cannot say the same for Miss Heather though.  I’m sure me sitting right behind her whilst she was attempting to bring my suggestions into digital reality wasn’t really helping matters.  I tend to be one of those individuals that wants something just so, and I don’t mind saying so.  Heather is like that as well, but with the added bonus of not wanting to change a damn thing she ever does.  So you can see where we might encounter, how you say…”creative differences”?  Regardless, we powered through it and produced 2 different invitations and a great set of printables that you can check out at our Etsy shop!

Purchase the Printable Collection pictured below, click here to go to our Etsy shop!

NERF Inspired Foam Blaster Printable Birthday Party Dessert Table Decor

Sneak Peek! NERF Inspired Foam Blaster Party

Are you ready for an eye-popping, dart flying, awesome good time?

Then look no futher than our NERF inspired Foam Blaster Dessert Table and Birthday Party.

Non-Expanding Recreational Foam, or NERF for short.  Our latest dessert table inspiration and the delight of most boys aged 2 to 35, well in this household anyway.  I have to admit, NERF is a guilty pleasure of mine.  Not everything NERF mind you, just the line of foam “blasters” that they toy company Hasbro has developed.  It all started for me back in 2008.  For some reason I decided to pickup at our local Wal-Mart, which happened to be the Kitty Hawk, NC location on the Outer Banks, my very first NERF blaster…the N-Strike Nite Finder EX-3.

The one that started it all…

To this day I don’t really know why I got it, maybe other than the fact that it looked “cool,” the very same reason that most men aged 2-35 tend to like the things they like.  Yeah…oh and you could shoot things with it…AWESOME! *takes a deep breath…calming down* Our youngest, my son, had yet to be born so it couldn’t have been to use during our play time.  No, all I really did was sit at my desk and shoot foam suction darts at the front door, with quite a bit of power I might add.  Sounds pretty damn mundane, but I had a blast.  It’s probably hard to understand the appeal, and even harder to articulate why I derive so much pleasure from a toy that is marketed to children ages 6 and up.  Hey I do qualify for that “and up” segment! 

I think Heather accurately sums up the mystery surrounding the appeal, when Desmond and I start brandishing the foam blasters and shooting each other, she just shakes her head and walks away.  But not before she is usually tagged by several well placed shots to the buttocks…  It’s like we, boys and man-children, are hardwired that way.  I think I’ll just leave it at that.  And now that I have passed on the legacy, and collection of several dozen NERF blasters, to my son it seemed only fitting to design a birthday table that would be worthy of that foam blaster heritage.

So without further ado, let me introduce to you the stars of the table. 

From the venerated N-Strike dart blaster line we have…

 

From the newer Vortex line of disc blasters, we have…

As you may have already noticed the two product lines of blasters look remarkably different, and the differences do not end in the cosmetic department.  They also fire vastly different ammunition, and the two different types are unfortunately not interchangeable.  The N-Strike line uses a combination of streamline darts, whistler darts, suction darts, or “tagger” darts if you use the Dart Tag line of blasters.  And if you are so inclined, you can actually manufacture your own “home brew” foam darts using materials you can find at your local hardware superstore.  Just to clarify though, the box and manuals specifically state to NOT modify the blasters in any way, but that’s pretty much the same thing as outright asking an intelligent and curious person to go right ahead and try. 

In September of 2011, Hasbro unveiled the new Vortex line of disc blasters, and pretty much turned the whole dart blaster scene upside down.  Not only did these new blasters use a different kind of ammo, the futuristic sounding XLR Disc, but they also promised ranges double that of the current generation of dart blasters.  This is due to the way the discs are propelled out of the blaster.  Think of these discs as miniature Frisbees, and a mechanism inside the blaster is spinning the disc rapidly out of the barrel, soaring towards the intended target.  And soar they do, quite far in fact.  But if you have ever fired a Vortex blaster you may notice that the discs will suffer from something called the Magnus Effect (whoa science man!), which basically means they will keep spinning away in the very same direction that the mechanism used to initially spin the disc.  The effect is pretty consistent though, so if you take that into account, you can become a crack-shot with this type of blaster.  Who knew that something kids use to pelt themselves…and parents…and pets, with over and over, can actually teach you something about the universe we live in?  Pretty awesome stuff…

For more information about our party please stay tuned for the full post with all the awesome details in a couple of days!