Finally Getting DeTANGLED

I did an Etsy search for Tangled ideas. (an excellent source of inspiration) Little did I know that there are a ton of amazing designers out there that will make invitations for you in a digital format -- for a very reasonable price. I saw this one (see below) and decided to try my hand at creating my own digital invite via Photoshop while using this as my inspiration. If you don't quite have the Photoshop skills, I highly recommend using this route for your party invitations. The quality is amazing, the price is totally affordable, and you can quickly email it to all of your party guests or upload the file to Costco and have them printed out so you can send in the mail. Mine went out via email ... see part above where I started late.

Just in case the link above doesn't work, this invite is from assilemward's shop in Etsy.

I really wanted to try and recreate pieces of the movie for this party. Thanks to my sister's boyfriend who works at Lowes, I was able to score several huge pieces of cardboard. On one large sheet, I sketched out a tower (trying my hardest to use the movie's tower as my guide) and then used my stash of acrylic paints to color it up. My husband then built a simple wooden frame and attached it to the cardboard tower so it could act as a photo spot for all of our little Rapunzel princesses.

I also used several rolls of yellow curling ribbon to create a Rapunzel headband. I have no pictures of the process but to do this, I first covered the entire length of a plastic headband (purchased from the 99 cent store) with LONG individual strands of yellow ribbon. I used hot glue -- be careful, it's hot! Then I cut 15 LONG strands of ribbon. Tied them in a double knot at one end. Then I hot glued that knotted piece to the headband. I repeated this process, placing each kotted piece as close to the prior one, until the whole headband had knotted strands across it. When the headband was covered with "hair" I went back and snipped off the tails on the double knots.

Here's my little birthday girl in her tower, letting her hair hang down. I think it turned out pretty nicely. Even some of us adults got into the tower for a picture.

I also very much wanted to recreate the purple flags are prevalent throughout the scenes when Rapunzel and Flynn Rider are in the town for the celebration. Now I know that in the movie they are triangles, but given my time constraints as well as my budget constraints, they were gonna be rectangles at my party. I purchased twelve 12x12 sheets of purple cardstock from Michaels. I cut each sheet into six 4x6 pieces -- these were my flags (12 sheets will give you 72 flags). Then I used my Silhouette cutting machine to cut out several sunburst shapes on some scratch cardstock. I tossed the actual sunburst diecut created and used the negative part as a stencil. Then I put my husband to work painting (stippling) the paint onto the flags. I used acrylic yellow paint from my stash and a foam brush. You may want to cut several stencils out because the paint will begin to soak the paper stencil making it impossible to create all of the flags in one pass. I had 6 stencils and I am thinking 12-15 would have been a good number. I then punched holes in each corner of the flag when the suns were dry and tied them all together using some thin purple satin ribbon. Tada!


In my head, the yard was to be strung with hundreds of lanterns to replicate the scene in the movie where the kingdom releases lanterns for the lost princess. But those darn budget restrictions prevailed and I had to limit the number I used. So you'll see that it looks a little sparse. I also had to factor in the rope swing range which prevented me from going directly across the yard. I found this website that seemed to carry paper lanterns for a good price. They also had paper bag luminaries in various colors. My thoughts on those being that you could hang them from a line and have them resemble some of the more cylintrical lanterns in the movie. This was a daytime party so none of the lanterns nor luminaries would be lit up. Although I think an evening Tangled party would be super awesome! You could totally buy light up paper lanterns and then set luminaries all over the ground with their glowing candles inside (note: fire hazard for little ones, best to go with battery operated candles in this case). Below you can see a shot of the party with a string of lanterns in the background as well as a shot where I hung a few of the lanterns under the patio cover. I used purple, pink, and yellow paper lanterns in various sizes and then lightblue, lime green, orange, and fuschia luminaries.

We commissioned a face painter for the party. No relation to the movie but we thought it would be a fun change of pace. She was awesome!

While walking through Dollar Tree, I saw these straws (below) and HAD to buy them. I thought of all the flowers that were put into Rapunzel's hair when the little girls braided it up for her. Little did I know that when you fan out the paper center, there's no good way of attaching it (no flap to tuck it into, no sticky back, etc). So I had to Scotch tape every flower which was sort of an unanticipated pain and time sucker. Probably why they were at Dollar Tree huh? Normally we do boxed drinks for the kiddos at our parties but given the straws, I bought 1/2 gallon juice cartons. Probably won't do that again. I am not sure how many parents picked up on that and we had almost all of the juice left over. I feel terrible if there were thirsty kids! I could always have just used the fancy straws in the boxed drinks. Lesson learned.

We have a rope swing in the yard and my husband had a good idea of trying to make the rope portion look like Rapunzel's hair. To do this, I took more yellow curling ribbon and tied about 100-150 strands from high up on the rope. Then I proceeded to braid all these ribbons down the rope. In all honesty, I probably should have used more like 1,000 strands to get the effect I wanted, but oh well. The kids LOVED the rope swing. If you have the tree and yard space, I highly recommend it.

With another large piece of cardboard, I projected an online image of Rapunzel and traced her. Then I painted her with my acrlic paints. You can see in the picture below that I also posted WANTED fliers all over the yard. I found this online too.

For a fun food item, I made jello boats. 4 boxes of the Blueberry Jello made me about 22 boats. Super easy. Pour the jello into the clear plastic cups, pop and orange slice on top (the boat), then stick a toothpick through a triangular piece of purple paper and stab it into the orange.

For a game, we played Pin the Tail on Flynn Rider. Unfortunately I didn't get pictures of the game in process nor a picture of the frying pan. But all we did was Google an image for frying pan, print it out on plain paper, cut it out, glue it onto black cardstock, cut that out and there was your frying pan. Slap some two sided tape on the back and you're good to go. Below is the picture we used. This is after the game, hence a piece of leftover tape on his neck. To get this image, I asked on the guys at my work to print it out on our plotter. If you know anyone who works in an architectural or engineering firm, or for a graphics design company, they'll have a large format printer and can do this for you. I am not sure if a printing place like FedEx Kinkos can do it for you since it is a licensed image.

For favors, I did two things. I purchased some paint sets at Dollar Tree. Then I bought a 500 sheet pack of white cardstock from Staples. I cut the sheets of cardstock in half and then packaged a pile of the paper with a paint set, tied it with some of that yellow curling ribbon, and stuck a little note on top saying "Thanks for coming to my party. Here's some paints to let your inner artist shine, just like Rapunzel." Sorry, no picture, but I assure you, a very easy thing to do. I also made some marshmallow pops (see below). To do this, you just buy some candy melts (got mine at Michaels) in purple and white. Melt them per the instructions. Stick a lollipop stick into a large marshmallow, dip in the melted chocolate, and then immediately into a dish of sprinkles. Let harden and then place in bag and tie with more yellow curling ribbon. I got the lollipop sticks and the bags from Michaels as well.

I knew I wanted to do a tower cake. I had no idea how I was going to accomplish this since I am by no means a pastry chef. Initially I thought I would make a sheet cake and the on top with rice cereal make a box type shape and frost it with buttercream. But then I saw this cake from Family Fun's website and I knew I was going in that direction. You'll see that I did end up doing a layered round cake on the bottom and then constructing the tower like theirs on top.

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For food, we served deli meat, cheese, and bread for make your own sandwiches. We had lots of fruit (pineapple, canteloupe, water melon, raspberries, etc). We had rainbow goldfish crackers.

There were outside speakers so we piped the Rapunzel soundtrack over them.

If I had more time, I think I would have bought or made more luminaries to use as centerpieces for the tables. Instead at the last minute, I bought two containers of plastic purple gem stones from Party City and threw them down the center of the table. Then I let each kid take a gem stone home.

Things I would have liked to have done:

Chalked a big sunburst on the driveway like Rapunzel does in the movie

Created a Maximus out of cardboard for the boys to stand behind and take a picture.

Invented some sort of game using green silly string and a target to act like Pascal's shooting tongue.

Made my own braided bread.

BIGGEST LESSON LEARNED:

Make a timeline list of all the things you want to accomplish in your party. Then assign a mom the task of reminding you of one task at the designated time. Why do I recommend this? Because I forgot to put out the jello boats and also forgot to give the first 3 guests that left the party their favors! Argh!

I am going to take this into consideration and begin to plan my other daughter's Nightmare Before Christmas party now. It's in October. :)