Sunshine and lollipops and rainbows, oh my! Hello My Sweet designed this amazing, Candy Land inspired Rainbow Birthday Brunch, complete with rainbow pancakes and rainbow ribbon-wrapped serving spoons. I just can’t get enough of all the budget-friendly, DIY candy decor in this party… look closely and you’ll see that the food and drink tables are even decked out with the board game‘s signature “rainbow path” – FUN! :)

PARTY HIGHLIGHTS to look out for:

• Rainbow fringed crepe paper streamers with white felt clouds for a fabulous backdrop
• Giant “candies” made from colored plastic plates wrapped in cellophane
• Adorable DIY individual utensil party packs with ribbon rainbows & cotton “clouds”

PARTY DETAILS, as told by Jason…

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Theme

For our super cute and adorable Sunshine, Lollipops & Rainbows party we were asked by our client to do a mash-up of a rainbow theme and elements from the Hasbro Candy Land board game. Brooke wanted to celebrate her daughter’s 2nd Birthday with something fun and colorful! We were lucky that both of those elements work insanely well together, and we were able to pull off some really nice décor utilizing ordinary crepe paper, white felt, colored foam sheets, ribbon, wooden dowels, and lots & lots of candy.

Backdrop

Our backdrop consisted of fringed crepe paper streams, strung across two white painted wooden dowels. We took the paper streams and wrapped them several times around the dowels and followed the color spectrum order… remember Roy G. Biv! Heather finished it off with two puffy clouds cut out of white felt and hand-sewn together with white embroidery floss, then stuffed with poly-fill.

We continued with another rainbow swag using the same crepe paper and clouds on the two lower tables to the right to tie everything together and break up the solid white of the tableclothes. We learned how to fringe our crepe paper from Jordan Ferney of the blog Oh Happy Day, which has a ton of cool ideas for easy party décor using tissue and crepe paper. An awesome resource for DIY’ers!

Food & Decor

Our plates and surfaces consisted of clear glass and white wooden surfaces, such as our Biscuit basket, our utensil tray, and the Whimsical DIY Stand (DIY here) that our Fluffy Mallow Clouds were plated on. We also found, at Dollar Tree, a white metal wire basket that served as our Bacon holder. In fact, quite a good bit of our décor came from either a specific dollar store, or the dollar sections at some major department store like Wal-Mart. The white metal buckets that became our coffee bar additions & fixins’ came from the ‘Mart, and the ever playful pinwheels also came from Dollar Tree.

On a separate family outing to a Toys-R-Us we spotted a huge tube of gumballs from the FAO Schwartz brand of sweets they carry. Initially we didn’t really know what we were going to do with them, total impulse buy on our part, but Heather quickly came up with the idea of doing a “Gumball Tree” similar to the “Rolo Tree” that we had done for one of our Christmas dessert tables, the Glam Inspired Peacock Christmas table. To assemble a tree like either of these requires a bit of patience and a lot of hot glue. We never planned to eat the gumballs again, so we glued them one by one onto a tall styrofoam cone.

We also made use of leftover candy from Easter such as jellybeans and licorice, caramels, translucent hard candies, as well as Dum-Dum suckers and brightly colored swirly pops. We used them all around the tables, from décor on the table itself along with cut out foam sheets to resemble the Candy Land game board itself on the table tops, to ingenious places such as the insides of our beaded glass 4 tiered cake stand. Our Dum-Dum suckers were inserted into a styrofoam ball until it was completely covered, which made one really heavy decorative candy piece. We did the same with the hard candies, only this time we used more hot glue, until we covered the entire styrofoam ball. Both of them were really nice accent pieces to the décor, adding more color and whimsy.

Adding in some decorative elements that were not edible was key to giving the background a special and colorful touch as well. Being huge fans of Pinterest we had seen so many pins of large pieces of candy constructed from colored plastic plates and cellophane. This was a super easy DIY, in fact the hardest part was finding enough cloroed plastic plates in the rainbow spectrum to pull it off. We had to go to several different stores to find them all. To make these, simply hot glue two plates together, bottom sides facing out. The using a sheet of cellophane (which you can get at Dollar Tree) wrap it like you would a present, only at the end use a zip tie to cinch the plastic at the edge of the plates on each side. Cut off the excess and fluff and you have giant candy! We also constructed giant lollipops as well. For these we used white wooden dowels, with a large inflated ballon attached at one end. Then we covered the balloon in a sheet of cellophane and used clear packing tape to secure it around the dowel. The only tricky part with these are that it usually take two people to assemble, since the cellophane does not like to stay put!

Utensils Pack

We are also very proud of the idea we implemented with our utensil pack. Using inspiration from the Garnish blog we wanted to create something really cute and functional too. Instead of purchasing pre-made bags however, we chose to use an ordinary brown paper sack (much less expensive), cut it down and put a fancy edge on the top opening, used white plastic utensils with a baby blue napkin behind it to mimic the white and blue of the sky. We also used some fantastic rainbow ribbon and cotton balls to accent the front. We had a blast watching the party goers find out that there was a surprise on the reverse side, a personal sized helping of salt and pepper. We have decided however that if we do those again, we will buy some small glassine bags for the salt and pepper. Folding 60 of them out of wax paper and stapling was just too much of a process! We also made sure to place the utensil packs, and the beverages, at the end of the breakfast buffet line to minimize the amount fumbling around with and balancing your plate that you usually find yourself doing.

Printables

Our printable décor was designed specifically for this event so that we could incorporate all of the elements of both rainbows and Candy Land! We chose to keep the background fairly neutral so that we could go colorful with the text and candy elements. We also chose to incorporate a menu display this time, which was something we had never done before. We think it added a nice touch to the tabletop display as well as helping the guests to identify everything, since it was a 9 a.m. party. We don’t know about you but Sunday morning as a parent is very foggy sometimes!

The printables are available for sale in our Etsy shop and the set includes text customization for your party!

All in all, we felt it was a huge success and the birthday girl was more than a little pleased!