Well I hope everyone had a happy Earth Day! Didn’t know it was Earth Day? Well that’s okay, there’s always time to make the Earth a more beautiful place. This year Earth Day was on a Saturday so I decided I had to throw a party. It was the first friend party I’ve thrown since lock down (okay, if we’re counting we had a couple small kiddo birthdays in there) and it was great to see everyone. Patricia and Julius had a blast as well getting to play with some new and old friends and do some crafts. And now we get to watch their creations grow so the fun keeps on giving!
As I mentioned I went a bit overboard hoarding trash for this party. For each item below I’ll let you know how I made it Earthy friendly, and how you could do the same!
Earth Day Celebration
Invites
Look at these amazing invites for Earth Day from evite!
Food
Everything at the party was vegan or vegetarian. As usual I made way too much food, but the great news is that means we haven’t had to think very hard about dinner or lunch the last few days. I also planned to make a vegan dessert (vegan bliss bites are seriously the best thing ever) but I completely ran out of time. Luckily Nina brought a delicious vegan dessert. I also planned to make home made lemonade, but ran out of time on that as well, and instead brewed up some quick iced tea from Harney and Sons – which Julius thought was the best thing ever.
Oh and I used napkins made from recycled paper and plates made from fallen palm leaves! The cups I used for the beverages were reusable (I bought them for Julius’ party and plan to continue re-using them.) And we did buy an assortment of beers and sodas, all of which were in aluminum cans (which is the most recyclable option).
The vegan sandwiches were vegan wraps, humus, lettuce, bell peppers, onions, sprouts and cucumbers. The vegetarian sandwiches were tomato basil wraps with cabot cheddar cheese, cream cheese, everything bagel seasoning, lettuce, cucumber, onion, radishes and sprouts. I thought they were both quite good, but next time I’d probably get some kind of herbed cream cheese for the vegetarian wraps.
Here’s the blood orange iced (herbal) tea that Julius loved and of course my Berkey for water. Behind are the reusable cups I use (some with lids and straws for kiddos)
Here’s the table, on the left are the palm leaf plates, compostable napkins and compostable utensils.
Food from top left going clockwise: chips, veggie platter, fruit salad, pb&js, 3 bean salad, egg salad, vegetarian wraps and vegan wraps.
Brownies and Earth cookies for dessert
Patricia enjoys her picnic lunch. (I bought a bunch of cute picnic blankets from the thrift store, but most people just sat on chairs.)
Games
I told everyone we’d have games and prizes, so I had to have at least one game. So I collected trash and recycling for “the recycling game”. It was really windy though so we had it have it in the garage so the trash wouldn’t blow away so we only had a few people play. Julius played and had a great time (according to Will). The purpose of the game was simple, sort trash, paper/cardboard and recyclable metals, glass and plastics into three areas. I had a few tricks in there too. I expected more families to want to do the game, so I put A LOT of items in the basket. The times ranged from 4 minutes to 14 minutes. Overall it started some good discussions about what is recyclable or not so I consider it to have been worthwhile! (Did you know pizza boxes are recyclable, despite the grease?!)
Keaton and Chandler rocked the recycling game!
Activities
Make your own terrarium
This one was a hit with the kiddos, several kiddos even made two (Julius included)! I collected glass and plastic jars that kids could fit their hands into for weeks, and even got some from folks on my buy nothing group because I was worried I wouldn’t have enough (spoilers, I had way more than enough). I scoured the thrift stores for plastic dinos or animals for weeks, but after about 4 trips I gave up and just purchased some unicorn erasers that looked cute in the jars. I also bought stickers that didn’t come in plastic packaging. The sand and rocks came from a local Home Depot (so I wouldn’t have to have them shipped to me) as did the peat pellets. I have way too much leftover so I’m debating what to do with everything.
Here are the terrarium making supplies! Note Patricia has already disassembled half the unicorns.
Here’s Patricia’s terrarium getting ready to sprout
Microgreen Garden
I got all the bowls for these at the thrift store. Again, I bought way too many even though I thought I wouldn’t have enough. I put it on the same table as the Terrariums since they used the same basic ingredients. I do have a funny story about this one… on the instructions I said to use .5 tsp of seeds. My friend’s son diligently read and followed the instructions but missed the ‘.’ so he is going to have a forest of chia microgreens! Yum!
Microgreen containers ready for people to plant!
My microgreens are lush and almost ready for harvest!!
Butterfly Picture
I have been collecting toilet paper wrappers for a while now (Who Gives a Crap is plastic free, but switched from paper to tissue paper wrappers recently, which is really not recyclable. So instead I have been collecting it for craft projects since I’m a crazy person. For the party I cut all the tissue I collected into tiny squares, and cut out ovals from some colored envelopes from kids’ crafts I saved from the recycling. Then I gave the kiddos a template, a marker, a glue stick and an example and let them go wild. Patricia decided to make “a flower” instead of a butterfly which I thought was quite artistic.
Look at these great butterflies Caleb and Mia are making!
Recycled craft table.
Pet Rocks
I already had most of the equipment for this one considering I’ve had several paint nites before. So I put out some water based acrylic paint, paint brushes, palettes, rocks, glue and googly eyes and an example. Patricia painted about 17 rocks. Most of them blue (no eyes that I saw) and Julius made a very adorable bumble bee. As for recycling I used recycled paper from shipping packages as a cover for the table, and used the laundry measuring cups I collected from way back when I used liquid detergent, as water cups. As a bonus I’m happy to report that the half gallon of paint on Patricia’s coat came off with a scrub brush. 
Julius and Patricia diligently working on rocks while Alex and Amy look on
Tie Dye
I did the tie dye a bit differently this year. In the past I have had everyone presoak their shirts in a mixture of sodium carbonate (soda ash) and water. This is time consuming and kids are impatient, so I decided to instead put the sodium carbonate in the bottles with the dye. This time around I did 1 Tbsp dye and 1 Tbsp soda ash and added 2 cups of chemical water solution as guests arrived (and followed the other instructions from prior). We’ll see how they come out. I will say it was actually messier to do it this way, and a bit trickier. The dye doesn’t disperse as quickly through a dry shirt, so you have to hold the nozzle onto fabric for a while or the dye mixture will just roll right off instead of soaking in. I didn’t have to buy much for this activity since I had everything on hand from past parties. If you are doing this from scratch you could save bottles from liquid dish soap to use as your dye bottles. They would work perfectly. I only provided a small set of gloves, and most people just chose to go gloveless (fiber reactive dye is not toxic once pasted out in water). I did buy a ton of cotton shirts from the thrift store for this activity, and to batch the shirts, instead of providing zip lock bags, I provided plastic bags I had cleaned from food items (chik’n nuggets, bread bags, frozen veggies etc). Since some of these couldn’t be recycled it got a second life.
Tie Dye Station. All the shirts were thrifted, and the plastic bags were washed bags that were not recyclable.
Tie dye being batched in reused plastic bags.
Seed Bombs
This idea I got from my sister in law. She got the recipe from her library! I thought this was rather fun, and the kids’ had a great time making them and then throwing them around the edges of the yard today. For this I purchased everything, but the cups I used to mix them in were all recycled food containers and the spoons were compostable (and a few were used plastic spoons I had washed). The perfect container to let them dry and transport them in is paper egg cartons! Luckily I had a few and Amy had even more for me that she’d been saving! 
Ready for some guerilla gardening…
Action shot of “planting” the seed bombs!
Prizes
Oh and of course I couldn’t have a party without prizes! Will asked me if I was having the party just so I could buy prizes, and I can only confirm that I did buy prizes before I decided to host the party. On the invite I told people they would get bonus points if they did things like drove in an EV, road a bike to the party, carpooled, collected trash, wore thrifted clothing or were otherwise Earth friendly. We decided to give everyone who showed up a ticket for a prize, and extra tickets were given away for doing the items above. And anyone who did the recycling game also got an extra ticket! The prizes were a great way to show off some of the products I use that are plastic free or more environmentally friendly. (I don’t get paid by any of the companies below I just really like their products.)
- Stasher Bags
- Dryer balls & Blueland Laundry tablets
- chain mail scouring pad & dish cloths
- Who Gives a Crap 100% recycled toilet paper, bamboo tissues and paper towels
- Upcycled foaming hand soap bottles with Blueland hand soaps
- Cool pop up water bottle I bought at PAX (all the proceeds went to Child’s Play)
Patricia painted about 17 rocks… and also her hands. I had to take her to the bathroom to wash her hands in the middle of the party. And then she painted her hands again!
Not gonna lie, I had a heart attack initially thinking this was a mother’s day post.
Second, I can’t believe pizza boxes are recyclable…that’s crazy!
Also, I want to make those vegetarian wraps! They sound delish!
Haha no… we need to work on that though! Highly recommend the wraps. I ate them for the next 5 days for both lunch and dinner haha!
Hahaha I know. I brought her inside at least once to clean her hands!!
You HOST more parties than I get INVITED TO. You’re a party superhero
Hahha thanks Matt! Just in case you didn’t know you have a standing invite to our parties. Anytime you’re in MA I’ll throw a party! Haha
The party was great! The food was delicious. The wraps were so good and Alex loved the Earth cookies.
The activities were very clever.. Alex came home with a cute pet rock and butterfly. If Audrey would have allowed it we would have loved to have done the tie dye shirts. It all looked so fun.
You guys can come by for tie dye sometime later and I can hold Audrey! I bought an Audrey size one thats she’ll probably outgrow in a week haha