Tea Party -13yr- Make Bath Salts

As a teen with a very very small budget for her birthday party, it's really hard to find good ideas for a 13th birthday. After surfing the web nonstop for maybe 2-3 hours, I finally decided to go with the tea party idea. 

INVITATIONS** - (I bought a small pack of card stock paper for this.) I typed out a simple but elegant and very sophisticated letter on my laptop saying things like 'You are cordially invited' and using curly fonts. There were also additional notes on the back to bring any makeup or accessories they had and to *bring* a change of formal clothes. I printed them out onto card stock paper, folded them 'professionally' and put them each into an envelope. There were 8 invitations, 7 for my guests and one extra for me to refer to.  If you don't want to type your invitation out, use vistaprint.com because they have pretty cheap invitations in 10ct packs. Guests were supposed to come at 1.30pm and stay until 7.30pm. 

DECORATIONS** - I bought a 2 packs of streamers, and 2 packs of 15ct balloons. I already decided the color theme was purple, green, and white, so I bought white and purple balloons, and purple and green streamers. This was basically enough to cover my entire dining room and backyard, with a little leftover to decorate the mailbox, front porch, etc. 

ACTIVITIES** - Since there aren't as many Tea Party related games/activities for teenagers I decided to buy a cheap 'make your own bath salts kit'. This took up almost an hour, and every guest (there were extras) got to make and keep a little bottle of bath salts. 

After this, It was around 2.30pm. Before the party I already had set up a little makeup table with mirrors and nail polish and makeup and wipes and stuff like that. When the guests came to the party I told them to leave all their makeup etc on that table. At 2.30 we started doing our hair makeup and nails for each other, and when we were done, got changed into our formal dresses. My parents then did a photo shoot for us and we ended up taking at least 200 pictures :) We took pictures with us holding balloons, and blowing bubbles at each other, etc. Everyone also got at least 10 shots of themselves.

After the makeovers and photo shoot, it was already around 4.30pm, so we all went to the dining room and started the actual Tea Party.  During the Tea Party we basically ate and talked nonstop and had a lot of fun. I also had them all sign a guest sheet with little comments and stuff. After the Tea Party we opened presents while their parents came to pick them up.  

COSTUMES** - Everyone was dressed up in a cute little dress. Thank god no one forgot to bring a dress, so it turned out really well. Some people also wore nice party shoes, while some people just wore regular school shoes.  

FOOD** - I created a menu around a week before, which consisted of: (Iced) Tea, tuna finger sandwiches, chicken salad, sodas and juices, bread loafs, sugar cookies, cheese and crackers, chocolates, a fruit platter, and cupcakes.  

CAKE** - Cake was just a plain old ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins. 

FAVORS** - After the photo shoot, my dad put all the ~good~ pictures into 7 cd's. I also put in a cheap makeup palette, 1 bottle of nail polish, 1 tube of candy flavored lip balm, and a bunch of bubble blowers. They also got to take home the bath salts that they made.

For favor bags, I used white lunch bags and folded them to look like tea bags. Then I stapled a piece of string to it with a name tag on the end.  The party ended at 7.30 after we opened the presents, and their parents came to pick them up. It was really amazing and I'm glad having a Tea Party for teenagers wasn't a bad idea. Everything came at a cheap cost, so the final price was very affordable. :)