Queen Elsa at the Cinema Brittahytta Frozen Sing Along

Oh, I have been looking forward to this party for months, and my Cinema Brittahytta Frozen Sing Along was a grand success! 24 of us had an icy blast, including 1 baby, 8 kids, 1 dog, no less than 4 handmade Elsa costumes, including my full Elsa the Snow Queen regalia, and even Olaf made an appearance!

Thank goodness the weather was nice, not too hot but not too chilly, because I was in several layers of costume including my thick platinum blonde Elsa wig…whew! I had finished all the final food prep the night before (how-to posts will be coming next), and all the last dirty work to get the yard all arranged was done early enough for me to shower and cool down enough for all my Elsa makeup before my special guests arrived from a 5-hour drive! My dear friend Natasha brought her two daughters to their first Britta party, and they were so excited! I had set aside safe ways they could help, like setting the crackers on the plates, putting the water bottles in the ice bowl, and stirring the fruit salad, but we ran out of tasks they were so helpful! They even each helped me put on one Elsa ice shoe…haha! We were all in our Elsa costumes and I was putting the last final touches on all the food displays when our next guests arrived…with Ellie as another Elsa! Photos were best in the shade, so we took a LOT of photos of the four Elsas with Olaf. We’ve all heard of “jazz hands,” but I said, “Everyone do your ice hands!” and they all knew EXACTLY what I meant! 😉

I had way too much fun with the food and decorations for this party. Of course I had fun with the names for the menu board plus I made signs or labels to display with each item, which you can see in the full gallery below. Lucky for me that my parents have a bunch of snowflake lights and giant plastic snowflakes for Christmas, so I borrowed those, and they made a huge impact! Even the small snowflake lights I taped to my tier trays and it was so festive for an evening party. I love snowflakes for Christmas as well, so I already had the cookie cutters for the Frozen Fractal cookies, and various snowflake silicone molds so I made a bunch of snowflake ice cubes as well as the chocolate for Love is an Open S’more. I did splurge to buy two posters and the Olaf cardboard standee, and since all the plates and napkins I found for sale didn’t fit my vision, I decorated clear plastic cups and plates with my own snowflake designs and aqua spray glitter. They were gorgeous! I carefully washed them all by hand afterwards so I can use them again someday. I even used the snowflake stencil labels I cut as decorations around the patio since they were coated in aqua glitter too!

We started the evening with small bottles of Melted Snow, and also Olaf’s Summer Cocktails: Mix whatever drinks that make you feel all nice and warm inside, then add a festive summer umbrella! I had bought a giant bag of cheap cocktail umbrellas, picked out just the blue and green ones, then used my cutting machine to make custom snowflake labels just the right size to stick on the open umbrellas. Lots of people used them, but of course I was the one who forgot to add an umbrella to my pina colada…oops!

Do You Wanna Build a Snow Cone? I had everything set up on the bar to make your own snow cones, including “adult” snow cones as a pre-mixed bucket of snowy-white pina coladas safely tucked away in the freezer…yum! Here are three Elsas enjoying the snow cones they built together!

When the coals were hot enough, we started our Grilled Snowflake Pizzas. The entire outer table was set with homemade hexagonal whole wheat sourdough pizza crusts, two plates of sliced mozzarella cut into various snowflake shapes, sauce and various yummy toppings so everyone could make their own pizzas as unique as individual snowflakes! Gail was the one who was able to keep her cheese in the snowflake shape, but arranging the toppings in six-way symmetry worked too. They were delicious as long as you remembered to take them off the grill before the bottom of the crust got too crunchy! 😉

We were finishing our pizzas by the time the other two clever food items arrived. I had baby carrots on my menu as Little Baby Unicorns, but Audene’s friend Debi, a first time guest, cracked us up with a carrot cake with piping saying “Like a Little Baby Unicorn!” Very clever! Eileen continued her streak of creative food contributions by bringing Frozen (Artichoke) Heart Dip and even printed her own sign! They obviously fit right in! 🙂

It was finally getting dark enough to see the looping snowfall video I had used on the front of my house for Christmas, so two Elsas started dancing and singing in the falling snow as others started roasting marshmallows at sunset for Love is an Open S’more. I thought of the phrase and it made me laugh every time I said it, so it had to be done! I decided that milk chocolate snowflake shapes from one of my silicone molds would fit perfectly on a graham cracker, and I topped them with an extra Frozen Fractal sugar cookie. They were set up as open s’mores on the plate, then you needed enough love to warm up your marshmallow to melt the “frozen” chocolate. Good enough story? It didn’t matter since they were s’mores! 😉

Before we all got settled into our movie watching locations, we made sure everyone had one of the special souvenir bubble bottles. I admit I got this idea from the Castro Theatre Frozen Sing Along, but it was really cute when the shadows of the bubbles floated across the screen whenever snowflakes were falling, so the three young Elsas spent a lot of the movie blowing bubbles!

It’s always difficult to get a photo of the entire audience when they spread out all over the grass, but Tash made a valiant effort! You can see we had quite a crowd in chairs, bean bags, and blankets. We even had a few more people to the left out of the frame! I couldn’t lean back too much because of my corset and my battery packs on my back, but sitting up properly helped my sing along posture. 😉 Speaking of singing, we had to rely on Kevin to sing all the male voices, of course doing an excellent job, but there were plenty of enthusiastic female voices of all ages and all abilities! I asked Tash to get up & try to get video looking back at us singing along to Let It Go, figuring if we got anything at all it should be cute. The beginning of the song was too dim on the screen to shed enough light on us, so I tweaked the image as much as I could, but as the ice magic gets brighter you can see us better, and you need to watch all the way to the end for maximum adorableness! 🙂

In their attempts to get the bubbles into the projector beam, my other two Elsas ended up sitting at the end of my chair. Violet had a sparkly snowflake headband (did you see her take it off at the exact time as the crown during Let It Go?), but Nola’s hair is long enough for an Elsa french braid, and Tash had made some of my aqua shimmer cut fabric snowflakes into Elsa-style hair clips…so cute!
We actually had two people in the audience who had never seen Frozen before, but thankfully they said our singing and general merriment didn’t distract from their enjoyment of the movie. However, you can tell who had already seen it countless times by who preferred to keep roasting marshmallows over the firepit. It made for a nice tableau!

After the movie was over, I couldn’t pack up the projector cart and speakers until I got out of my outfit, so I asked if anyone wanted photos with Elsa and Olaf before I changed…so there was another line, just like the princesses at Disneyland…yay! When everyone else was satisfied with their photos, I asked for some of me and especially the cape, since I didn’t get to take nighttime photos before. We still need to do a proper photoshoot like we did for the coronation dress, so hopefully before the summer is over we will get that chance, but this one with Olaf is pretty darn cute. 😉

During my photoshoot with my “fans,” everyone else cleaned up the outside for me! The regular movie night guests know to bring in everything off the grass onto the patio, so that usually happens quickly as everyone carries something, but even everything off the pizza table had already been taken inside before I could get a chance to take any more photos! I finally got out of my wig and dress (probably only 5 hours this time?) and into shorts and a snowflake t-shirt while a few stayed chatting all the way until 1am! What a great party!

Thanks to everyone who made it such a fun night! You can see the rest of the party photos in the gallery below, and watch for more posts how to make your own Frozen Fractals cookies, snowflake cups and plates, Brrrie in Pastry, and Love is an Open S’more!

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