This You Are My Sunshine Birthday Party is completely sun kissed! Jenny of Bloom Designs Online crafted this party for her daughter, who is her little “sunshine”. :) The girls dined and sipped on a sun-inspired meal (sun chips, sun-dried tomato pasta & more!) underneath a draped sunset colored canopy and took home activity keepsakes of painted sunscapes, decorated flip flops and gum ball necklaces!

PARTY HIGHLIGHTS to look out for:

• Stunning DIY outdoor table canopy with sunset colored ribbons and yellow lanterns
• Layered orange, pink & yellow popsicles, meringue parfaits, & cake towers
• Three-tiered cake decorated with Necco Wafers
• Colorful party favor beach buckets full of “Our Sunshine’s favorite things”

PARTY DETAILS, as told by Jenny…

“You Are My Sunshine” was one of the first songs my husband and I taught our daughter Hillary, so I was very excited to create a party around this theme especially since the song still expresses exactly how we feel about her. Hillary was turning nine so I didn’t want to use a sunshine image. Rather, I used simple polka dots and blocks of yellow, orange, light pink and pink create the feel of a sunset. Phrases of the song are repeated in all of the printables and on posters around the party.

Dinner was under a canopy made from sunset colored ribbons which I had stapled to a overhang off our garage. The girls ate our only sunshine’s favorite sandwich, sun dried tomato pasta, sun chips and sunset jell-o (layers of raspberry, orange and lemon) and drank sunshine soda all of which were packaged in gable boxes. I made placemats to match the invitations and name plaques for the chair backs.

After dinner, the girls made necklaces out of sunset colored gumballs, decorated sunshine shoes with pink, yellow and orange ribbons and painted sun scapes.

Desserts included cake balls, homemade marshmallow clouds, meringue parfaits and cake towers all in layers of yellow, orange and pink. The girls also had, sunsicles, sherbet ice cream, salt water taffy, rock candy stick and sugar cookies. The cake was decorated with Necco Wafers.

As the girls left they took a bucket of our sunshine’s favorite things which included when skies are grey colors, silly string and bubbles all wrapped in personalized labels. The printables are made with a polka dot and chevron pattern in sunset colors. The entire You Are My Sunshine collection including invitation, water bottle labels, banners, food labels, juice box cover, crayon box wrappers, straw flags and more is available here.