A Trolls Themed Birthday Party For My Favorite 2 Year Old

My favorite roles in my life are being a wife and a mom, but just behind those two, it's being an aunt. I love being an aunt, and truth be told, my sweet nephew was the biggest driving force behind me wanting to come back to Texas for this tour. 

That handsome nephew turned 2 this week! I love playing the role of party planner, and my sister and I started planning his party months ago. His favorite movie is Trolls, so we decided that would be the theme! If you haven't watched Trolls, it's adorable and on Netflix, so go pop the popcorn and see what all the fuss is about. 

The cool thing about Trolls is that it is all about bright, bold colors. That made the decorations fun and easy! There were also a lot of ways we were able to save money while throwing this party, and I am excited to share those as well! So here are some of the decorations we decided on, how we did them, and how we saved a buck in the process. ;)

The mantle was my favorite project to work on. I wanted it to be noticeable from across the room and be bright, bold, and fun!

I created this graphic on picmonkey.com (my favorite picture editing/design website), and then I printed it at Walgreens as a poster and glued it to a foam board from The Dollar Tree so it would stand up. Walgreens always has 40% off coupons for photo products, so this project ended up costing about $7.

This project... it still haunts me in my dreams. ;) You may remember reading this blog post about my battle with the crayon art, but the finished product ended up looking exactly like I wanted it to. For the canvas, sticker letters, and crayons (I already owned the paint that I used to paint the trolls), this cost about $15.

I purchased the foam letters from Hobby Lobby, and the banner is just pictures glued onto scrapbook paper that I also purchased from Hobby Lobby.

If I haven't talked about my obsession with The Dollar Tree lately, I'll do it now. It is AMAZING what you can get for $1. A good portion of the party supplies came from The Dollar Tree, including these paper lanterns. They were 2/$1, and I just taped them around the edges of counters to add a fun pop of color. Easy peasy. 

When we decided on Trolls as the theme, I knew I wanted to do a big balloon arch. I knew there was a 50/50 chance of me royally screwing this up, but it was worth trying, and I am happy to report that it was pretty straight forward! I took a long piece of twine and just tied balloons to it. I already had the twine from a previous project, and I purchased the balloons in packs of 25 at The Dollar Tree. This project cost less than $5 but made a big statement when you walked in the room. 

And now for the food... the real reason we have parties. The food was colorful, delicious, and had zero calories (okay, that last part is a lie, but the rest was true). We decided what we were going to serve and then created Trolls-themed labels for each item. 

I created the labels using picmonkey.com, printed them out, and glued them to the leftover scrapbook paper from the banner on the mantle.

The cake was purchased at HEB, and my sister purchased little Trolls characters to stick on top of it. The Happy Birthday candles came from The Dollar Tree. 

The party favors for the kiddos consisted of bubbles (3/$1) from The Dollar Tree, little whistles (a pack of 8/$1), and goodies from this Trolls party favor bundle on Amazon. In total, it cost about $13 for 9 goodie bags. 

All in all, I think it was a really successful party. The kids had fun, the adults enjoyed himself, and my favorite little nephew turned the big 0-2! Happy birthday, little man. You are so loved!