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Parties: 1st Birthday For Jodi

I hope you all had a lovely weekend! We have been having lots of sun and warm weather which always makes for a great weekend! As I mentioned last week, yesterday I helped my Mom throw a shower/1st birthday party for a little friend of ours. I already showed you the invitations and now, I get to show you the rest of the party decor!

When we started planning for the party, I found the invitations first and that sort of sparked the rest of it. That meant we already had the color scheme planned and we were going to use animals in the decor. My next step was to gain inspiration. Whenever I start to work on a party, I look through certain blogs for ideas. A few of my favorites are You Are My Fav and Hip Hip Hooray!. Check them out for yourself, they are awesome!

The party was at my parents house. Here are some shots of the dining room all done up:

I made the origami letter banner after seeing one here by following instructions from this site. Then I strung them all together.

I also made a fabric bunting that you can see on the window. It’s super easy to make. I cut out triangles from fabric with my pinking shears and sewed them all together onto a ribbon.

My Mom has the large chalkboard hanging in the dining room so I decided to put it to good use! I found my inspiration from here and even though hers are way better, I really like how it turned out. I did it all by hand and it was really easy to do. If you want to try one, I recommend practicing first on paper because it’s much easier to draw with a pen than chalk!

As my Mom and I were party planning, we realized we actually had a bunch of ceramic type of animals around our houses that we could use as part of the decor. I brought a few over but most of them were hers. After seeing this post we thought it would be fun to put party hats on them all. It ended up being one of my favorite elements!

To make the straws, I simply cut fabric into strips and tied it around the straw in a knot. Don’t they look so cute in the elephant?

I also made a party hat for the birthday girl. I made the ruffle out of fabric and then sewed it onto the paper before I assembled the hat. Here was my inspiration. Do you recognize the elephant? My Mom and I both have one and I painted mine white but she painted hers silver. I think it looks awesome!

I also made these popcorn cones and we had a big bowl of popcorn for people to fill their cone up with. I just used some lightweight scrapbook paper I had on hand to make these. My Mom had this wire stand and it worked perfectly to hold them.

We had two cakes plus a little cake for the birthday girl. One day while I was out thrifting I found two of these metal stands. They were in an ugly color but I could envision them sprainted in a fun, bright color. So I brought them home, bought two cans of spray paint (yellow and blue) and painted them. Then, I bought two ceramic candle holders from the thrift store and painted them white for the base. To secure it, I just used sticky tack on the bottom of the cake stand. It worked like a champ. As a bonus, you can take them apart to make for easier storage.

For the bunting, I saw this blog post and knew I would make my own sometime. I folded a piece of paper and cut a triangle shape (unfolded it’s a diamond). When I had a whole bunch of them, I folded them over a piece of string and taped it together. Next, I tied the string to wooden skewers and stuck them into the cake. For the one, I cut it out of sticky felt and stuck it to a toothpick. Super simple but really cute!!

Since there were guests all over the house, we added some paper bunting to the living room mantle as well. We also added party hats to any animal we could see. I really loved these elephants!

We also had a little area set up on the buffet which had party favors:

Next to the party favors, we had a predict the future book. I came up with this idea to make a book for the birthday girl where guests could predict what she would end up becoming.

I created the pages in Photoshop and there were all sorts of topics. On each page, guests would write their name and their guess for each question. I think it will be fun for the parents and for the b-day girl as she grows up.

I had three of these smaller chalkboards that I got at a thrift store. I drew each one by hand but I printed out the phrases in a font I chose and then used them as a guide to look at while I was drawing them so I would know how to make each letter.

And lastly, upstairs we had a make-shift photo booth. We cleared a space so we would have a blank wall and then I set up my tripod and took pictures of each guest. I spray painted a couple of wooden frames in bright colors and then the guests would hold it up in front of themselves while I snapped a picture. It was really fun and is a good way to make sure you got a photo of everyone who was there. Here is one of Jason and the b-day girl:

So that’s how our shower/1st birthday party turned out. Whew! If you made it through this whole post you must really love me :) If you have any questions about how I did anything, let me know!