Train Party Decorations

Celebrating 3(!) Part 4…

Maddy Loves Thomas the Train and all his train friends. Seriously loves them. I have video of her as a two year old cruising through the Thomas website and naming each and every character just by seeing their picture.

We went through a phase a couple of months ago where she pretended to be a train every single day. She would wake up in the morning and announce which character she was that day. She also would give Luke and me train names.The train name use was required by all.

Lets just say I was not surprised when she said she wanted a train party for her birthday this year.

I instantly set to work brainstorming a train party for her.

Decorations, treats, goody bags, food and entertainment. Have I mentioned I can be a tad obsessive?

Even though I know she loves Thomas I am not ready to have character themed parties. There is nothing wrong with character themed parties per se. Let’s just say that Thomas and his friends get enough of our money in the form of train, table, track, book and toy purchases. Doing something a little more generic while still cute saved us a bunch of money and left the door open to our own creativity instead of being locked into the 1 or 2 choices at the local party store.

I decided to work with a color pallet for all the train birthday party decorations that would be familiar to Maddy and her friends without buying all the branded things from the party store.

The Thomas packaging is all light blue with touches of red and yellow. I decided working with brighter primary colors instead of the light blue would give me more options. I also made the executive decision to throw green into the mix. I’m a rebel. I like green and even though green isn’t an official Thomas color it is the color of Percy, Thomas’ best friend, and a couple other engines.

To really play up the colors I bought red, yellow blue and green fabric to use as tablecloths. The fabric was an easy and fairly inexpensive way to spread the colors throughout the party.

Once the color pallet was selected I had to actually figure out what I was going to do  to go along with these colors. I wrangled Luke into taking pictures of trains and train related things at Day Out With Thomas at the Colorado Railway Museum.

We printed out the pictures and I turned them into the center of our train birthday party decorations. With some red, yellow, green, blue and white poster board I mounted the pictures to give the pictures basic- which also means inexpensive- colored “frames.”

Around the dinning room light I hung pictures using clothes pins and then taped colored circles up to cover the clothes pins. The circles said things like “choo choo,” “chugga chugga,” and “clickity clack.”

Over the entry to the kitchen we stung a mixture of mounted photos and some of the pennants used for last years rainbow party. I like reusing things. We also incorporated circles into the kitchen entry by hanging 3’s.

The 3’s might be my favorite part of all the decor. It makes me happy when something I make comes out just as I had pictured it. Colored circles with 3s, it sure doesn’t take much to make me happy.

Luke’s photographs were just what I was hoping for and added a lot of official train feel without a lot of official Thomas decor.

Seriously without these awesome shots we would have had hand drawn trains which probably would have looked, um… interesting.

All-in-all the only pre-made decorations were some balloons in our 4 colors. The rest of the party decor was either made up of photographs, colored paper, twine and fabric or they were already in Maddy’s toy arsenal.

Other Train Themed Birthday Party Posts

• Celebrating 3(!) part 1,Gratitude and Celebrating 3(!)
• Celebrating 3(!) part 2, Train Party Cupcakes and A Recipe
• Celebrating 3(!) part 3, Train Themed Sweet and Treats
• Celebrating 3(!) Part 5 , Train Themed Party Favors and Entertainment