DIY Lemonade Stand For Your Kids

We grow a serious amount of citrus in the Lam household.  During both lemon and lime season, we’re continually scratching our heads to determine how we can use up all our citrus.  My son is a budding entrepreneur;  we thought it would be fitting to squeeze all the lemon juice and build a lemonade stand for him!

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How to make the stand!

You will need:

1. 4 unfinished wooden crates
2. White acrylic paint
3. Foam brush
4. 2 wooden dowels–3/8 inch
5. Wood glue
6. Cardstock paper to decorate
7. Scrapbooking glue (I will link my favorite below)
8. Cricut Explore Air 2
9. Cricut Design Space App
10. Cricut cutting mat (standard grip)
11. Lime green ribbon for banner

How do you like my painting assistant?  Little brother had to make his mark on this project!

Paint all your crates and dowels white.  You can either glue your crates first or temporarily put them together so you do not have to paint all the sides of your crate.  When you glue your crates together, we found it helpful to clamp them to ensure they were snug against each other.

Now it’s time to affix the painted dowels. The dowel size was perfect to stick into the cracks of the crate.  After I stuck the dowel into the crate, I enforced it with invisible tape inside the crates.

Now for the fun part–Decorating the stand!

Since we decided to serve lemonade and limeade at our stand, we thought it would be fitting to have a lime green and bright yellow color scheme.

This banner was made with white, lime green, yellow cardstock, and lime green ribbon.  The banner was attached to the dowels that were attached to the boxes.  If you have Cricut Design Space, you can easily make this banner.  After you open Cricut Design Space, click on Images on the left hand side and search for lemon.

Click on the lemon slice that you see highlighted in green and click again on Insert Images in the lower right corner.

Because we wanted to use only the lemon slice (not the whole lemon), we had to figure out how to eliminate the picture of the whole lemon. Following is the neatest trick to get rid of part of your image.  In the left side-bar, you will see a Shapes link.  Click on the Shapes link to find a square and place it right over the whole lemon.  Click on Select All in the top menu and then hit Slice on the bottom right menu.  Deselect all and (a) erase the square, and (b) erase the whole lemon.

It is possible to fit 4 lemon slices on one page of your yellow paper.  You can see each lemon slice is about 5 inches wide for this banner.  Now you can glue the lemon slices onto white paper.   Use your favorite font to make the lime green Lemonade letters.

We purchased lime green cups, bright yellow cups, and paper green striped straws to match our stand.  Our menu sign was also made in Cricut Design Space by using the cutting and writing tools (the lemons were the same image we used before when making the banner).  We all agreed that it would be best to make sure that all of the serving trays and beverage containers were non-breakable materials.  Target came to the rescue because we were able to find serving pieces that were non-breakable but still stylish.

Regardless if we make Lemonade or Limeade, we use the same ratio below:

1. 2 cups of simple syrup (which consists of 1 cup water and 1 cup sugar boiled until it’s dissolved)
2. 1 cup of lemon or lime juice
3. 2 cups of water

Makes 1 quart of homemade lemonade/limeade

You can either make one quart or double or triple this recipe to ensure that you have enough for a party or lemonade stand (it goes quicker than you think so make enough).  Get creative by infusing your lemonade with raspberries and add visual appeal by adding fresh slices of lemons or limes.

A benefit of using crates for your lemonade stand is that you can display food items within the crate cubby (and the not so desirable looking items like the register in the back crate).

Zesty limeade cupcakes were on our menu today to go with our limeade and lemonade stand.  We used the same straws that we served with the lemonade cut down into quarters and inserted into our cupcakes.  The fun wrappers were downloaded printables that came from Etsy here.  I was able to instantly download these cupcake wrappers for only $1.50, which sure beats the cost of those fancy cupcake liners (not to mention I didn’t even have to drive to the bakery shop).  My reliable color printer whipped these liners out in no time!

The lemonade stand is open and ready for business!  Of course the kids are the first to taste-test.

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