Wow! My daughter wanted a Fancy Nancy themed party this year and I just have to say that it was so fun and easy to put together! Not to mention a very affordable theme!
For those unfamiliar with the Fancy Nancy book series by Jane O'Connor, she is a young girl who uses items from around her home to make her room, family, and life more fancy! So instead of buying decorations, expensive party food, and cake toppers...you can make a fancy party using items from around your house!
Now, I bet a lot of you are thinking...yeah, but that means you need to have fancy things in your house! But trust me, when I started walking around the house with my daughter we found fancy things in the strangest places :-) So I thought I'd do a blog post on some of the things that worked well for us!
1) Fancy Nancy Birthday Cake
I love to decorate cakes! I've done a ton of different styles and I have to say that this wa
s one of the easiest I've made and came out looking the most elegant! Once the cake was baked it really only took about 45 minutes to build and frost it start to finish! As far as cake pans go I used two 9-in. rounds and two 6-in. rounds. I used two cake mixes to fill up the four pans and baked them according to the box directions. (of course my daughter picked funfetti because that is fancy!) The top layer is simply a 4 in. round gift box that I found at the Hallmark store. The only realdecorating I did was to frost it pink and purple and piped on a few words and trim. The bottom layer was actually my favorite and took no time at all because it was just random squiggly lines! After that I topped it with gold ribbon leftover from a Christmas project, costume jewelery from my kids dress up bin, and few make-up items from my bag! Ooh-la-la!
2) Fancy Nancy Decorations
Get creative in where you look! We got a lot of our party decorations out of our holiday decoration boxes. Especially Christmas and Valentine's day. The Christmas stuff provided us with with lots of gold colored items as well as a white beaded garland! While the V-day decorations obviously provided us with hearts, and frills, and pink galore! I also found a box of old materials I used to make bouquets for my wedding! That gave us pink ribbon to curl! We also found some purple tulle in my fabric scraps that made our light fixture look quite fancy! We also hit up the girls dress up box for some of the other table decorations!
3) Fancy Nancy Party Food
The food for this party was a big money saver over ordering pizza or something of the li
ke! In fact there is even a Fancy Nancy tea party guide that can give you some more ideas! The biggest thing that made it fancy was instead of forks, we cut everything small and the guests ate with toothpicks! Because "everything tastes better when you eat with frilly toothpicks!" according to Nancy herself! Plus you can take a lot of kids favorite foods fancy by miniaturizing them! Here are a few things that we did!- Banana and peanut butter finger sandwiches (use a heart shaped cookie cutter)
- fruit and dip (don't forget the frilly toothpicks!)
- raspberry lemonade (I sliced a lemon and added that with some frozen berries)
- pepperoni and cheese kabobs on toothpicks
- cheese and crackers
- party mints
4) Fancy Nancy Party Favors
Some of our table decorations doubled as party favors! I did buy 2 dozen fresh roses (on sale at Smiths for 12 dollars) that were used as a centerpiece, flower petals, and as party favors. I also bought a dozen small tiaras from Amazon for 8 dollars and some extra doilies for 4 dollars. I used them on the table and then sent them home with the girls! So instead of spending a ton of money and time putting together party favor bags that will be thrown away within a day by the other moms...I sent each guest home with a tiara, a necklace, and rose! Pretty fancy!
5) Fancy Nancy Activities
For activities I referred to Fancy Nancy books! In The Fabulous Fashion boutique they have a birthday party for her sister where they play fashion show and walk around with bananas on their head for posture! Each girl came dressed fancy so we had fashion show and had relay races with bananas on our head! I also found a Melissa and Doug alphabet necklace set on Amazon. It was 10 dollars and came with enough supplies for all of the girls to make a necklace and take it home! If you are more crafty than I am I'm sure you could come up with a craft from supplies you already have! Some other ideas that I didn't do but read elsewhere were to have an etiquette school, have the girls decorate old pairs of sunglasses with jewels and feathers, or make tiaras.
Well, those are my random thoughts about throwing a Fancy Nancy party! I'm sure other have come up with many more creative ideas!! I just couldn't believe how much fun it was to put together this party! I think my daughter enjoyed finding the decorations and making the food as much as she enjoyed the party itself! That's the magic of Fancy Nancy though! Taking everyday things and making them fancy with your family!
