A few months ago, I was hunting for cute birthday party themes for Cora's First Birthday. I came across Stacey's party and thought it was the perfect theme for us. Here's what we did...
I created a photo collage (above) on my fav photo site picnik (so sad this site will be shut down in April). The collage was used for the invitation and for the cake.
The Invitation
The invitation was created on Paperless Post. I'm not the biggest fan of paper invitations
because of all of the paper waste, but I understand that some people don't have e-mail (like my mom). Paperless Post allows you to create beautiful e-invitations/e-cards, but you also have the option to print them out. Here is what the invitation looked like. I just printed this on nice card stock.
Timeline Banner
Since the venue for the party was already beautifully decorated, I kept my party decorations fairly simple. I knew the colors of the room had a lot of earth tones, so I chose pink and green for the party colors.
I created a timeline banner of Cora's first year. I painted clothes pins in glued on the number medallions with a hot glue gun. The medallions were just a punch of paper and the numbers were cut from my Cricut machine.
The timeline banner held pictures of Cora from each month of the past year.
Treats
I had two tables of food. One table was a snack table and the other was a yummy treat table. Here are the details...
My uncle and I made the wonderful cake pops. I find that traditional cake balls are too sweet, so instead of balling up cake and icing and dipping them in chocolate, we just just cut out pieces of pound cake, inserted the pop sticks, froze, then dipped in colored chocolate. The decoration on the pops are from chocolate transfer sheets. the flower pot was $0.79 at Ikea. I just cut out a large flower and a C on the Cricut and glued it on.
The cookies are done just like my easy no bake thin mints. Except that I used colored chocolate instead of Andes mints and used the chocolate transfer sheets again.
The popcorn bags were made from small treat bags. I used the Cricut to cut out C's and 1's and glued them on the bag. The popcorn was a salty/sweet mixture of cheese and caramel popcorn.
More Goodies!
I knew I'd be crunch for time to do a cake so I purchased a 1/2 sheet cake from Costco and asked them to only ice it in white. I took a jpeg of the collage picture from Picnik and had an edible sugar sheet made at a local cake supply store. I also purchased the colored Sixlet chocolate balls to border the cake. I found the CORA letter candles at Party City.In keeping with the colors of the theme, I offered 2 beverages: pink strawberry punch, and cucumber water. I put them in beverage dispensers.
Since my party started at 2:30 in the afternoon, I just had deli and veggie trays, love dip and chips, and fruit skewers. The chocolate oat crisp cookies came from Ikea (I love those cookies!).
Photobooth and Party Pics
I made fun pink and green shades and moustaches. I also made talk bubbles out of chalkboard contact paper, matting board, and wooden dowels. I hired a photographer who captured photo booth type pics and all of the other party pics. I really love how this turned out!
Last but not least, since I had leftover chalkboard contact paper, I decided to make mini talk bubbles to put in the party favor bags. The kids got mini talk bubbles, chalk, stickers, and other various goodies. We had a wonderful party and Cora was showered with a lot of love! I hope you enjoyed the pictures!
Have a happy day!
