Peeps,
Even though we weren't having a giant shindig for Ben's birthday, I was really excited about some of the details. And why not? He wasn't going to remember it but it would be fun to have the pictures and a few of the bits and pieces for his baby book.
I can guarantee that his subsequent parties won't be anything like this, but going all out for his first one was ok in my book.
So: the details.
You already saw the invitations:
Simple and modern, but fun (in my opinion)
You can read about the invitations here (how we fancied them up, and what we wrote on the inside). The cards were designed by Just Eleanor.
The cake was a (rather lopsided) 4-tier spice cake with chocolate ganache frosting. It also had a layer of lemon cream cheese frosting but it was hard to detect. The chocolate tends to overpower other flavors. My mom made a raspberry sorbet that was divine.
I made the cake banner and the birthday hat from a piece of patterned cardstock.
I decided I was going to try my hand at making another little toy for Ben, in keeping with our Christmas attempts.
Here is the little elephant softie that I made the bambino:
I really, really like the fabric.
A while back I'd seen a tutorial (but no pattern) for making soft animals on a website called While She Naps. She made this elephant. By this point, I'd looked through a lot of sites trying to find an ideal elephant pattern. Here was a site with a beautiful elephant shape and a tutorial to boot! I just needed the pattern. Using one of her photos, I drew out the shape using a computer program and then started sewing. It didn't help that I started this project two days before his birthday. Time crunch.
I hit a few bumps in the road (eventually resorting to super glue in one particularly nasty spot) but was pretty pleased with how the whole thing turned out. Plus it fit right in with the invitations.
This picture has nothing to do with the post, I just happen to like it.
I was also pretty jazzed about Ben's special birthday shirt. We found a seller on Etsy called SayItInStitches that makes personalized shirts. I emailed her a design and she was so accomodating. We messed around with the layout, the fonts, the colors, the fabric..pretty much everything.
I really liked the finished product!
And fortunately the cake and frosting that was smeared all over it at the end of the day came out easily in the wash.
And last but not least, we had the weekly photos. I'm going to do another post of these but here is a quick summary.
We had three categories:
- Monthly Photos [One from from every month of Ben's first year]. Count: 12
- Weekly Photos [One from every week of Ben's first year]. Count: 52+ (sometimes I couldn't decide on just one for that week]
- Holiday/Firsts Photos [A photo from all the major holidays: Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, etc plus several "First" photos: first food, first vacation, first time he crawled, first time he got sick, etc]. Count: 10ish.
This project was so much fun, despite being a lot of work. We're going to stick the pictures in an album. It was fun for people at the party to look at ("My god he was a chubby baby!) and I'm glad we did it.
And there you have it, Peeps, the birthday details!
xxoo,
Sonja
