pony party

a delayed derby party

It’s April, which means the Kentucky Derby is right around the corner. I was first introduced to this event by a former coworker from Louisville, and kind of fell in love with it.

So way back in 2020, Halston was turning 4. And since she’s a May baby, I started planning a derby themed party to take place the day of the Kentucky Derby. Then the world shut down. The derby got delayed, and so did her party.

But in June that year we forged ahead with the party. It is still one of my favorite parties I’ve ever planned and I’ve been champing at the bit to show you.

One of my favorite details was the charger and plate combo. I wanted them to look like a horse show award ribbon when combined. So, I folded cardstock into fans and glued them together to form a circle. Then I hot glued wide ribbon in different shades of pink to the back side creating the charger. I ordered vinyl gold glitter number decals in each of the kids ages from etsy and stuck those on the paper plates and voila! Their ages served as a place card. I shoud note that every kid at the party was a different age, so it did make it really easy. I repeated a similar horse show ribbon detail as the decor at the drink station.

The hats are such an important part of the Derby tradition. I bought the pink hats from Old Navy, and just hot glued yellow ribbon and faux flowers onto them.

I purchased these miniature trophies from Amazon, as well as the miniature horses. I then bought these metal stamping blanks from Etsy. I hot glued the horses on the metal circles to create a lid for the trophy treats. I then spray painted the lid and trophy separately in various colors and put pink and yellow starbursts inside. Everyone is a winner at our derby party!

While I had the spray paint out, I gave the trophy decor and horse shoe set a little makeover too.

For the table runner, I bought these vines from Amazon and tore all of the flowers off. My original plan was to have horse balloons at various heights along the runner to appear as though they were racing down the table. Why run for the roses, when you can run through them right? I thought it was was going to be such a cool centerpiece. Only, I didn’t consider the wind factor. That was never going to work. In the end, I just dispersed the balloons at different zones around the party, and added the painted trophy decor to the table runner and it worked very well.

At the food table, we had sandwiches, chips and dip, and these perfect little cookies with horses on them. I lined the insided of the painted plastic trophies, and that served as our chip dip bowl. For additiona decor, I added the “rose garland” around the horse (knight) chess piece that I’ve had for years. But the centerpiece was undoubtedly the beautiful rose cake pops, placed in the trophy like vase. They were made by the amazing Rosebeary’s Bakery here in OKC.

For activities, we had a horse shoe set, a stick horse race with the most beautiful stick horses from Etsy. And of course, what kind of pony party would this be without a pony? We had pony rides with little Daisy from Pony Party Exrpess.