Cricut'ing Carol: The Birthday Party! Photo-heavy post!

I've eluded to a secret project that I had been working on for a little while, but now that the party is over, I can share the details!

My stepdaughter turned 15 on October 2nd and we decided to throw her a surprise party! She had been talking about wanting to do an Alice in Wonderland themed "something" for a while, so I recommended we try to do a Mad Hatter theme Tea Party for her birthday. Everyone thought it was a great idea! I volunteered to do the invitations and other crafty things since her mom will freely admit that she doesn't have a creative bone in her body. I poked around on some online message boards for some ideas and suggestions and came up with a plan for the invites and we sent them out to family and passed the word around to her friends via word-of-mouth. We were going with the surprise planning for almost a month.

Unfortunately, the surprise lasted until the night before her party. We had planned to have her come spend the night at our house on Friday night so her mother could set everything up at her house for the Saturday morning party. Well.... Kelly (being the good ROTC girl that she is), volunteered to work a double shift at her school's football game, which would make it impossible for her to come to our house (as she wouldn't get here until around midnight). So, we had to tell her what was going on. She was thrilled!

Friday night, dearest husband and I were up until almost 2am getting our stuff together to take over to her mother's house in the morning. When we arrived, I found that their neighbor (with all good intentions) had taken over essentially. Instead of the mish-mashed teacups, mish-mashed chairs, and whimsical decorations and food.... I found a very beautiful and elegant tea setup. Not what I had pictured, but beautiful nonetheless. My invitations, drinks, and snacks didn't fit in anymore. :-( I was a little disappointed, but Kelly loved it anyway!!!

We had tea-party foods (egg salad sandwiches, sans crusts; deviled eggs; banana bread; TastyCake cupcakes; breakfast casserole; fruit; etc), hot tea, cold tea, and mocktails (orange juice and gingerale).

I had also made whoopie pies as take away snacks...with the Alice in Wonderland theme mixed in!

And continued the theme on the drinks....

These are the invitations that I made (using A Child's Year for that hat image and the Swiss Dots Cuttlebug embossing folder for the inside; I changed the typical "10/6" that's on the Mad Hatter's hat to "10/2" for her birthday and found an Alice in Wonderland-type font for the inside wording).