Monkey See, Monkey Do...

Today's post is about making cupcake toppers for our upcoming monkey luau party for our daughter's 3rd birthday.  I try to decide well in advance what the theme of their next party is going to be so that I have plenty of time to research ideas and pick things up as I go, rather than a huge expense all at once.  This years party inspiration started when I found this party line:

And yes, it was 50% off at the time too--Yippee!!  A friend mentioned it had a luau feel to it and I loved it so much I decided to go with it! So, Monkey Luau it is! =)

I only have one month until the big day so I started a couple days ago making things.  First up, cupcake toppers.  I rely on my trusty Cricut and SVG files for these.  First I had to decide what size I wanted them to be. I believe I went with 3" (keeping proportions) and cut those out, as well as their coordinating bellies, faces & ears.

This is what they looked like after they were cut. Please ignore my nasty Cricut mat, it's really on its last leg, but I'm making sure it's gets well used because, well, I'm cheap thrifty like that!
Next I had to piece them together.  Now this was the tedious part. Usually for small things like this I use my small Xyron machine, but for some reason it's MIA. Boo!  The only other thing I had on hand was a scrapbook gel glue. A little messy, but worked well enough.  Here they are after I attached those bellies and such:

I planned on then just adding mouths by hand & wiggly eyes, but they just looked so BORING to me! Hmmm, what did they need? I KNOW!!! HULA SKIRTS! What's a luau without grass skirts, right?  And boy, I thought the last step was tedious, this was even worse. LOL  I set my Cricut to cut out 1" wide trapezoids and then I had to hand cut fringe onto them to look like skirts. Boy, Martha Stewart had a great idea when she came out with fringe scissors. But alas, since I don't have any, I got to hand cut 24 mini grass skirts.  I then added a paper flower to the monkeys ear and WHALA!!!

 So, what do you think??  Apparently my daughter is in love with them because every time she sees them she runs and hugs me and says, "Thank you Mommy! Thank you for my monkeys!!"