Apple Party Poppers

For as long as we’ve been married (15 years!), my husband and I have hosted what we call our “Apple Party.” It started out small, and as the name suggests, involved picking apples at a nearby orchard and then returning to our house for a dinner party. Over the years, it has grown exponentially in size, and along the way, we stopped going apple picking and just focused on the party part.

You can read all about it in the article my husband wrote for New Hampshire Magazine here. (I wasn’t quite expecting such a big spread. In the printed version, there is a full-page picture of me and Jason … good thing I knew the photographer — my mom — would do an excellent job!) But I also wanted to highlight the craft project we did last year:

I got the idea from HERE. They are confetti “poppers.” I prepped all the tubes (This was a last-minute idea, so I actually ordered 70 empty toilet paper tubes from someone on eBay!) ahead of time with the balloons and tape, so the kids just had to decorate them with stickers if they wanted. The only downside was that I way underestimated how much confetti they would go through, and we ran out pretty quick. (I don’t have a shredder, and it took a long time to make that much confetti!)

I also just realized I never wrote here about the photo booth I made for that party. You can read the tutorial I wrote for AP a few months ago here, but basically, I turned a refrigerator box into a photo booth (I got the box free years ago from an appliance store when I made Parker a castle for his 4th birthday), and set up my iPad with a photo booth app.

I had planned to let people print their pictures on the spot but my printer was not cooperating. It was just as well, since our guests took hundreds of pictures throughout the day and evening! I’ll definitely be pulling the booth out again for this year’s party. It has held up pretty well just being folded flat and stored in the garage. We’ve even lent it to other friends.