I’ve thrown a fair amount of parties for my girls over the years (you can see them here) but I think this painting party for Maia my be one of my favourites, it was such fun!

Venue

This was the first time that we used a venue as opposed to having it in our local park and we did this for two reasons:

1. Unfortunately there aren’t any bathrooms at the park we normally use which gets quite tricky, especially with the little ones

2. Honestly I just didn’t have the energy to set up all the big things like tables and carting it all around or making the majority of the snacks

Of course the most logical place for us to have Maia’s party was at our favourite family friendly restaurant; Kiddilicious. If you’ve been following me on social media for a while you know that we basically live there and have since the day that they opened and we really do love going there.

They have a private party venue that you can book out and use exclusively but we chose to rather book out some tables in the restaurant and rather have the party there. In the weeks leading up to Maia’s party, the weather went from great to absolutely terrible and on the day it was bucketing down with rain. Thank goodness we were able to be undercover with canvas drop downs on the sides of the seating area and so we were all so comfortable and cozy, an absolute lifesaver because I was definitely stressed about that!

Food

What’s a party without great food, amirite? One of the perks of having our party at Kiddilicious is that they took care of most of the food (they could have done all of the food but you know I like to add my bits and pieces where I can). We ordered four big platters of food and everyone commented on how delicious it was, especially the chicken pregos!

I made a few little platters with sweet snacks on: multi-coloured coconut ice, jelly oranges in the primary colours and wafer biscuits dipped in different coloured icing. I had some plastic buckets in different colours in my party box and so I filled those with popcorn and placed them on the table

In terms of drinks, each of the kids had a little juice at their place but anything else was for peoples own bill. I really thought about this a lot, but the bottom line is that if we had to fork out for 40 peoples drinks, it would more than triple our bill and that just wasn’t an option. I can honestly say that no one minded paying their way (especially because I had mentioned that drinks weren’t included on the invitation and we provided food) and if I was invited to a party where I needed to pay for my family’s drinks, it wouldn’t be an issue to me at all. I spoke a bit more about my thoughts on catering and sticking to a budget in this party blog post.

Michelle from Purple Whisk knocked it out of the park as usual with the cake. Maia chose to have a cake with rainbows all over it and Michelle did it perfectly, she even added little paintbrushes onto it to tie into the paint party theme. The cake was made up of rainbow layers and had a condensed milk flavour buttercream filling, how delish?! She also made us red velvet and carrot cake cupcakes in the same theme and they were an absolute hit.

Party pack and activities

This is something I always love coming up with, and the painting party was no different!

As always, I poured over Pinterest for ideas and finally decided to put together a little art kit for each child. Initally these were going to be the party favours/party pack for everyone to take home but because the weather was so miserable, they ended up being a very welcome activity for the kids to do… and they loved it!

Each child’s place setting was made up of a plain coloured paper plate (I actually had a ton of these in my party box), a little packet of sweets, a juice and of course the art kit. I also lined the middle of the tables with plain brown paper and had khokis, crayons, A4 brown card (also from the party box, they were actually single use placemats but worked so well for art!) and extra paintbrushes and paint for everyone so that they could draw and paint as much as they wanted to.

The little sweetie packet was so easy to make and everyone commented on how cute it was. I used them to put a little roll of sweets and a lollipop in but the original idea on Pinterest showed them being used to hold cutlery which also looked amazing. All I did to make them was go to a hardware store and collect paint sample cards (which are free), one per child. Then at home I just cut out the same amount of the same shape in a plain card. To secure them together, I just punched a few holes and stitched them together with string. So easy, so cost effective and so cute!

I love personalising juices or flavoured milk for place settings and it’s actually really simple to do. I went with Oros bottles this time as they are significantly cheaper than flavoured milk and they were on special at Checkers. I measured the heights and length of the original label and then in Canva, I used those measurements and created my own label. I then got that printed onto sticker paper. If you live in the Bedfordview area, my absolute go to for printing is CDS Plotting in Edenvale, they are so affordable, so friendly and so quick, highly recommend.

The little art kits were also really easy to put together and also not ridiculously expensive. I went to our local Mr Panda and picked up an A5 canvas and paintbrush for each child plus some bottles of acrylic paint. Next up was Westpack where I got little pill dispenser boxes and some bottles of glitter. All that I had to do then was decant the acrylic paint and glitter into the pill dispenser boxes so that each kiddo would have a variety of different colours to use. I then tied the little bundles together with thank you notes that I made on Canva.

Decor

This is where I really feel like I hit the jackpot because I literally had to do nothing. The Kiddilicious team did everything, they have a whole arsenal of party decor on site and can decorate to your theme (this is an additional cost and not a prerequisite of having your party in the restaurant area). The painted arch, balloon arch, paintbrush and dripping paint signs were all done by them and it just looked so gorgeous and exactly what I had envisioned. Literally all I brought was the letter board, how easy is that!

Of course the little art kits and bits and pieces on the tables also added to the theme but the staff at Kiddilicious really pulled it out of the bag for us.

All in all, Maia’s painting party cost about R4000 for 40 people. This is including absolutely everything, including tips for the staff at Kiddilicious. I reckon that for a party at a really amazing venue, food from the restaurant, a professionally made cake and art activities for the 16 kids, budget wise we did really well.

What did you think of this theme and our change to having our party at a venue as opposed to a public space?