For our daughter's past three birthdays, she has had her parties at our house with her dance team friends. She usually comes up with a theme idea or we scroll Pinterest and come up with a few theme ideas for her to choose from. This year, she had a few theme ideas she was debating on, until we came across the idea for a Taylor Swift party. She was immediately adamant from then on that her theme for this year’s party would be Taylor Swift, and it quickly escalated from there.
I’ve been a Swiftie since I first saw Taylor in concert when I was a senior in high school and she was an opening act for Brad Paisley. I remember connecting with her as soon as she said how happy she was to be playing the show considering she would otherwise be sitting at a desk every day for her junior year of high school. As soon as the concert ended, I went straight to the store and bought her first album, and I’ve loved everything she has done since. Needless to say the fact that Everleigh is now just as big of a Swiftie has been such a fun thing for us to bond over.
Before she had chosen the party theme, I was able to get tickets for us to see Taylor in Chicago for the Eras tour this summer and had planned on surprising her with them, so when she picked this theme I knew we’d be going all out with it. Thankfully we live in an awesome mid-sized community that has so many talented local makers, so I was able to source most of the items for the party right here in Central Illinois.
The concert ticket style invitation that we also turned into a banner was designed by Pronata Marketing. We went with a bright, colorful, and sparkly concept, and Mandy with Pronata was so thoughtful and creative to even include Everleigh’s birth date as the seat location information (5/10/2016).
We always have a few organized activities for the girls to do, so Mandy also designed these placemats that included the names of the dancers on her team. The girls had an absolute blast completing them as they ate lunch and were competitive over who could find the names the fastest. Mandy also ordered us a thick glossy poster of Taylor for a “pin the microphone on Taylor” game. For the microphones, I just selected an image and sized it appropriately for the poster, then printed them out on card stock and used double sided tape on the back side.
The door mat on our front porch was made by Kensington Cuts. We’ll be leaving this out at least through summer!
The cookies were a funfetti sugar cookie created by Wild Flour Bakery and the cake was a cookies and cream flavor created by Fairytale Sweets Bakery. They were both extremely accommodating to work with. I sent them a few pics for inspiration, and the outcome was beyond what we could have imagined. Better yet, everything was absolutely delicious.
For the goodie bags, each girl got to take home cat ear headbands, heart sunglasses, play microphones, and shirts with different Taylor song lyrics that we made with Cricut. All of those items can be ordered online and are linked here.
We had a Taylor playlist blasting and the Reputation concert special from Netflix playing on mute throughout the party. It was beyond exhausting, but in the best way possible. Seeing the girls having so much fun together was so worth it. Check out the video showing the party decor, and don't miss this video of Everleigh finding out she gets to see Taylor in concert in a few weeks!