I am the second youngest of 5 kids, and the youngest of the bunch just joined the armed forces! Since I happen to live 20 minutes from Lackland Airforce base my mom asked if I wanted to host a party for the whole family that would be coming into to town for the graduation, and I instantly started brainstorming. Since I'm only a summer blogger lately (lol) I haven't chronicled the many parties I've thrown in the past few years, but at this point the pressure is on with my friends and family!
I decided on a paper airplanes theme to keep everything fun! Then I started folding, and folding, and folding. In total I folded around 200 paper airplanes!
I think the dessert selection was definitely the highlight of the party.
These little heart cookies were a crowd favorite! They were the first to go! (I think it was because they had the best frosting to cookies ratio)
My wonderful sister made all of the cookies! She is amazing at sugar cookies and I keep trying to get her to start a "cookie of the month" club so I can eat them ALL THE TIME! Go follow her on instagram and message her how much you want cute cookies too!
To save on time we had our local grocery store make the cupcakes, and I just made the airplane toothpick topper!
Photo-op backdrops are my new favorite thing. This one is made of my hand folded airplanes, and Dollar Store tissue garlands. (The white tissue garlands are on their third party!)
Here are some quick steps to make the paper airplane strings:
-To make the airplanes different sizes I folded either a whole piece of paper, half a piece, or a quarter of a piece. Because the proportions are different on rectangles for the half piece I did trim about a half an inch off the bottom before folding.
-I used THESE DIRECTIONS to fold the planes. It worked great!
I used a long piece of wood leftover from building our dining room tables and tied a bunch of strings to it. To me this was easier than hanging each string individually.
I was working on this at 2am and the board kept slamming off the table while LEGO-Man was sleeping, so I got a couple clamps to clamp it to the table.
Then I used a large tapestry needle and strung all of the airplanes onto the string, I Just poked the needle straight through the top of the plane in the center fold.
Then I started glueing the airplanes to the string so they would stay in place. I just put a big glob of hot glue on top of the string and pinched the fold closed. On some of the planes I angled them up or down to give it a little more variation.
When all of the planes were strung I hung the whole bar on the wall. I looped a piece of ribbon around the end of the wood and attached it with a push pin. (uuuuhhh I can only find googley eye push pins lately, don't judge me!) This is the same method I used to hang the photo backdrop but I put the loops into the ceiling a few inches from the wall to give it more depth.
The horizontal paper airplanes were strung differently. There was no hole involved, I just glued the string into the fold in the front and the back. I made sure to glue it toward the top of fold so that they wouldn't get top heavy and flip upside down.
Overall I loved this project and the guest of honor was so excited about it (but it could have also been that it was their first time off of an airforce base in almost 9 weeks....)
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