A Train Themed Birthday Party!

My little guy just turned three and I decided that he needed to have a train themed birthday party. My son loves trains. He is all about Thomas the Tank Engine and is completely enamored with all things train. Picking a theme for his birthday was not a difficult decision.

I did not want Thomas the train faces plastered all over my house, but I did want there to be trains. I got a little train happy on Pinterest and found some great ideas. I pinned a few of my favorites and went to work putting together my very own train themed birthday party for my little conductor.

I decided that I wanted to make a majority of the decorations myself. There was nothing out there that was chic enough for my taste so I decided to create my own birthday party décor. I usually use streamers, but this time I wanted the vintage feel of pennant signs so I got crafty with scrapbook paper and twine. {To see more about the birthday pennant sign and how I made it click HERE}

With the birthday sign and decorative pennants complete I moved on to the party favors. One of my favorite things about children’s birthday parties is the goodie bag that comes at the end of the party. Usually the goodie bags are filled with rubber balls, crayons, and stickers {or the equivalent} and sometimes there is even a treat inside. I decided that the goodie bags for the train party needed to go with the train theme, so I ordered engineer hats, wooden train whistles, and red handkerchiefs to go in each goodie bag. I wrapped them in brown paper lunch bags, tied a ribbon around them, and added a thank you sticker to the top or each goodie bag. I displayed them in a vintage looking piece of luggage.

As the party drew closer my son requested balloons for his party. I did not really want to go and buy balloons and helium and deal with long balloon strings and children fighting over balloons so I went with the idea of balloons and ran with it in a whole other crafty direction. I made yarn balloons to be displayed over the sliding glass doors. My son got his balloons and I got to do a new and entertaining craft. {To see more about the yarn balloons and how I made it click HERE}

There was a lot of leftover yarn from the yarn balloon project so I decided to try my hand at another craft that I had my eye on from Pinterest. I made three yarn wreaths to be displayed in the windows under the birthday pennant. Simple and easy, these wreaths were a breeze to make. {To see more about the yarn balloons and how I made it click HERE}

The last thing that I whipped together for this party was the train food trays. I knew that I wanted a fun way of displaying the food for the party without breaking my budget and I had a ton of cardboard boxes just waiting to be recycled that I could use for this project. I even had leftover red wrapping paper from Christmas! I wrapped the cardboard boxes in red wrapping paper and used a scrapbook punch to create circles out of black scrapbook paper for the wheels. I flipped over the wrapped boxes, taped on the wheels, and displayed the food in clear glass containers on top of the display boxes. I thought about having the food inside the boxes, but it was too much work trying to find containers that fit perfectly.

I ordered my sons cake from the supermarket and picked it up the morning of the party! The cake was really cupcakes that were frosted as if it were one cake. Half the cupcakes were white cake the other half were chocolate. No silverware needed!

I loved this birthday party and so did my son! He had so much fun running around showing off his decorations {he helped to make a lot of the party decorations and was really proud of his work}. I had a lot of fun putting this together and even more fun enjoying it the day of. Have you ever thrown a themed party? If so, what type of theme did you go with?

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