New Years Eve hat making party

A couple of years ago Jon and I had family in town for New Years and we decided to make our own hats to celebrate the festivities (one year we even stuck a sparkler out of the top of Jon's hat and lit it for the count down into the new year!). We had loads of fun doing it and have since started a little tradition of hat making for each New Years Eve.

This year, as we're still in Colorado, we decided to bring the tradition with us to share with all the extended family. Everyone loved it but the nieces and nephews were the ones who really got into it and ran with it.

I laid out piles of white, pink and gold card stock and let everyone decide which color they wanted their hats to be. I used the template for the hats found here. I then set out a number of decorative trimmings, glitter puff paints, markers, etc. and let everyone go at it. (I found that after-Christmas-sales are a great go-to for sparkling New Years fan fare. I made these gold glitter star garlands from old Christmas tags and I used gold baubles from the marked down dollar bins at Target for the other garlands. Their are so many gold and silver holiday items that really work well for New Years festivities).

My sister helped the Littles with puff painted lettering and I adhered some of the more difficult trimmings.

I loved to see what everyone came up with and the Littles were very proud of the specific touches that made their hats their own.

I especially loved my little niece who insisted that she completely color her hat blue, as she wanted to do things different from all the others. Another niece came up with the darling idea of making hers a princess New Years hat, complete with a dangling princess ribbon.

For fun festive confetti I cut circles out of various colored paper with a 1 inch circle punch.

The confetti was a big hit with the Littles and a new favorite of mine to make any simple celebration more festive.


I think all had a great time with this little hat making craft. Little A had a lot of fun with creating the hat but then opted out of the photo shoot early to continue playing his Starwars Lego WII game that Santa has brought him.....He then, sadly, shortly thereafter contracted the flu that Jon and Little O have had, so the poor boys were cooped up in bed with 7-up and saltines while I finished up the photo shoot with my nieces and then wrung in the New Year without so much as a celebratory kiss.

2011 has been a full year complete with changes and many an up and down. I'm happy to say that a great deal of the ups have been in the past couple of months and I'm excited to enter the new year with an air hope and possibility!


So here's to 2012! Happy New Year!