My daughter turned two at the end of March. When planning the party in January, I learned that NASA’s Artemis mission was supposed to land a woman on the moon for the first time this year, so I decided to do a Two the Moon party! (The mission has since been rescheduled to next year.) I started by researching on Pinterest, picking up a few supplies on Amazon, then I got crafting for all the other stuff! Rather than flooding the site with individual posts, I decided to do one big party thread, so here goes…
Painted Dresses & Tees
First the birthday girl clearly needed an outfit inspired by the wonders of the cosmos. When I didn’t see anything I loved online, I decided to create one. And while I was at it, I might as well make one for myself. And a tee for Nana… And the little girl across the street…
I bought plain black dresses (from Primary for Ada and Torrid for myself). I picked black tees for my mom and little Mina (and later for every other kid attending) at the craft store. I started with Nana’s & Mina’s for practice. For each of theirs, I also wrote out their names like they were constellations.
For painting the dresses, I read a ton of tutorials online. Most used a diluted bleach solution, in a spray bottle to create random stars and galaxies, but I hate working with bleach, and I wanted to be able to do this indoors, as it was March. I started by using natural sponges, to sponge white fabric paint, over the areas I wanted to put galaxies and nebulas. (The white paint underneath helps the color paints applied later to ‘pop’.) After the white had dried, I went over it with shades of blue, turquoise, purple, and pink fabric paint. I faded/feathered each color off the edges of the white, so some went onto the black fabric itself. In these areas it looks like the gasses from the nebulae are dissipating, creating a more natural transition to solid black.
After those colors were laid in, I finally went back with some of Jacquard’s Lumiere metallic paints. Because these have 2 tones in each one, the colors change depending on the direction you’re looking at them. They really, really made the paintings come alive, giving them a great deal of depth.
After that I went back with thinned white fabric paint, and a brush, and splatter painted in the fields of stars. The randomness of the splatters helps keep your stars from becoming too perfectly ordered. You do need to thin the paint in order to get it to splatter, but when it dries, it gives very faint spots, which make the stars look farther away. In order to get some greater contrast, and give some brighter stars, I went back with solid white and the tiniest brush I had, and added pinpricks of white over my favorite stars. Here’s Ada in hers, making a new friend.
Activities
Our friends here in town have kids that range in age from 2-12, and I figured all but the littlest two would want something more to keep them occupied during a toddler birthday party. Since my studio opens to our dining room, I cleared off my cutting table, and set up a coloring station there. I printed tons of coloring pages from NASA’s website, and laid out all the various sized crayons I could find.
But that was only going to keep the big kids busy for so long, so I decided to let them paint galaxy shirts too. We used the laundry room, where I laid down some plastic table cloths from Dollar Tree on the floor, put out a folding table, and got black tees for each kid in their size. Then I took them in two groups, to paint their own shirts. I went over how to layer the paints to get different effects, then had them each give it a go however they liked best. I heat set them after the kids went home, then washed and dried them, and dropped them off a few days later. The kids liked them so much that they wore them to school for the Eclipse!
Balloons & Garlands
I had been wanting to repaint our dining room for a year, so we gave ourselves the deadline of Ada’s Birthday to get it done. Jim did nearly all the work hard, repairing the walls from 40 years of abuse, then painting with 3 colors, and a ton of decorative trim work. After all that, I was worried about putting up Command Hooks on such newly painted walls. I had read somewhere that with new paint, the hooks can sometimes fail, and take a large swath of paint with it. So I skipped building the balloon arch, but scavenged all the foil balloons that came with it, like planets, stars, moons, and an astronaut. I blew those up, then used a mix of bent paper clips and pushpins hidden on the top of doorframes to hang them.
(Rainbow Star Balloons
(Folding iridescent star decorations)
(Balloon arch kit contained the astronaut, giant moon, planets & other balloons not pictured)
(Iridescent strung stars and garlands)
I also made some giant 3-D Silver Star balloons, but I truly hated them. They were such a pain to blow up 12 individual points, then tie them all together. I used them on our stairway, going up the railing, so they’d be the first thing guests saw as they came in, but I wouldn’t bother with them again. The rainbow stars however, were one-piece balloons, that went together easily. I highly recommend them, as they looked so impressive, but took no work. I forgot to get a picture of the railing, but here they are for size reference in Ada’s play yard, which is 5’ wide.
Galaxy Projector Light
I picked up a projector light on Amazon, and placed it on a side table, shining up on the wall &ceiling. It changes color, so I tried to get a few shots. Unfortunately it doesn’t show up as well in the afternoon, so the pics were all from that evening. The adults were losing their minds when it was going at night.
Color Changing Galaxy Lemonade
There are variations of this all over Pinterest. They all use Butterfly Pea Flower tea in some way, which brews up deep blue, but changes to purple or even bright pink, depending on how much acid you add to it. In my case, I made a lemon simple syrup, and then batches of dark blue tea, frozen into ice cubes shaped like moons, stars and hearts.
I laid in a few plain ice cubes, then the blue ones for the upper 2/3 of the glass. Hit the ice with a bit of edible shimmer dust, then poured in the lemon syrup, a bit more of the blue tea, and topped it with seltzer or champagne. The kids loved watching me make each drink. Most asked how it worked, but 12 year old Max informed me quite plainly that I must be using an acid to change the PH of the liquid to achieve such an effect.
Chocolate Dipped Pretzels
These are a repeat of a snack I made last year. The kids liked them so much, I decided to do it again. There’s a million tutorials for them online, so I won’t bother here. Basically dip in one color, then drizzle with another color (or another 4 colors), then add sprinkles.
Galaxy Chocolate Bark
I used the leftover candy melts to do a large batch of galaxy chocolate bark. I laid down a layer of milk chocolate (Ghiradelli milk chocolate melts), then a layer of black candy melts, and drops of the other colors on top. I swirled them with a skewer as fast as I could because the candy really wanted to set up, and then added more sprinkles. Finally I puffed on some edible shimmer dust to make it sparkle.
I laid the candy and treats out on a couple large platters. The Oreos were a fun find: Space Dunk Oreos! They had images of stars and planets and rockets on the outside, and inside was a swirl of pink and blue frosting, filled with Pop Rocks!
I also ordered some decorated sugar cookies from an amazing lady in town. She loved the Two the Moon theme, and at first proposed pastel, girly cookies. But when I asked her to turn up the volume on color, and showed her what I had already done, she delivered with amazing space themed cookies!
Despite all of the above, my mom was worried that we somehow wouldn’t have enough sweets (she was afraid my cake was too small), so she made Texas Brownies (yes, from that same recipe card everyone got in the mail in the 90’s), and we used the same black cocoa, which really, really worked on the brownies. They had no food coloring in them at all! After she finished them, I decorated with sprinkles and candy stars & planets.
Painted Favor Bags
I bought party plates and cups on Amazon, but they wanted way to much for galaxy favor bags. I picked up a 12 pack of plain black bags at Michael’s, and just painted them while I was doing mine & Ada’s dresses.
Inside each kid or family got a bag of chocolate bark, a dipped pretzel, a Crayola kids bath bomb that looked like a planet, a space themed lollipop, some extra coloring pages, and the moms all got little holders for hand sanitizer, shaped like astronauts, that make noise when the kids clean their hands. The kids also got to pick out their favorite of the sugar cookies, and add it to their bags.
Galaxy Cake
The cake is my masterpiece. I was pretty thrilled with how our dresses came out, and how the party looked as a whole, but I was over the moon about how the cake came out. I watched just about every galaxy cake tutorial on YouTube, and decided to mostly follow one of them, while stealing a few techniques from the others.
I used a box cake mix for the sponge, creating 4 layers, of pink, purple, blue, and turquoise. For the black frosting I used something called black cocoa powder, which isn’t actually black. But it is a very deep, rich shade of brown. By starting with a naturally dark color frosting, you are able to use a lot less food coloring, to get a true black. (If you try using white icing, and just adding food coloring, you end up with a deep grey color, and you get bits of color gel separating out of the icing, which looks gross. Plus it turns everyone’s tongue’s black.) I wish I had got progress shots of the frosting. The chocolate frosting was the richest looking I’ve ever seen, and it tasted great. I added my black coloring, and let it sit for 2 days, for the color to darken. After that it was still reading as very dark brown, so I added some blue, which took it straight over to a dark rich black.
The color frostings were all just tinted white icing. I stacked the layers, with black icing in between, then did a crumb coat of black. After that I went in and added splotches of the colors all over the cake, in random patches, and used a straight edge buttercream tool to smooth them out. Then I laid on another layer of black icing over the whole thing, and used the buttercream tool again, spinning the cake on a lazy susan, so that when the black was scraped away, you could see the colors under it, giving it the effect of a gaseous nebula.
The tutorial I followed kept the cake very plain at that point, but this was for a toddler, so I went a bit more fun. I added some candy stars, moons, and planets, as well as little puffs of edible shimmer dust. Finally, I added a cake topper of a little astronaut telling us she’s ‘two’ (or giving the Peace Sign), and added two long, skinny, silver candles to frame it. The topper actually came with 3 astronauts, so I used the other two around the table.
Here’s the Birthday Girl excited about her cake…
And getting some help from mom & dad blowing out her candles.
