Charlotte's First Birthday Party

I'm about a month behind in my blogging! Stay tuned for a blog on Charlotte's baptism and on her first pigtails! Very exciting stuff :)

Charlotte's first birthday was so much fun! A HUGE thank you to all of our family and sweet friends who joined us to celebrate her first year of life :) The party was in the morning from 10 am- 12 noon because Matt had a wedding to get to later in the afternoon. It ended up working out great because all the kiddos were in happy moods and everyone was still able to enjoy their Saturdays with their families. Most importantly, Charlotte had a great time. I should mention that she was NOT a fan of the cake. Be sure to check out the pictures at the bottom of this post :)

This blog entry will mainly be about the party details, so if that's not your thing you can stop reading here :) (Ahem, men in my life!)

Instead of a theme I decided to go with more of a color concept :) Charlotte's party dress served as a jumping off point (yes, I bought the dress first!) We used blues, yellows, pinks and greens! I wanted it to feel very springy. I picked out blank invitation stationary from Paper Source and printed our own invites (click here to see the stationary) The mums made me very happy :)

Keeping with the colors and the feeling of spring I decided to make pinwheels for the fireplace garland, table decorations, favors and floral arrangements. For this I just bought inexpensive scrapbooking paper from Hobby Lobby and used a spray adhesive to join two sheets together to create double-sided paper. Super easy and cost effective! I found a pinwheel tutorial online and got to crafting! I was able to spread the work over a few weeks so it wasn't too much of a hassle.

Since it was a morning party, the food-side of things was very simple. I just wanted to have a few snacks and drinks. We served pigs-in-a-blanket, goldfish (served from a punch bowl for fun!), flower and butterfly shaped sandwiches (just used a cookie cutter for this), cream cheese pinwheels (made by my mother-in-law), and fruit! For drinks we had apple juice, water, lemonade and Dublin Dr.Peppers for the adults (my father-in-law brought these!). One of my favorite things were the paper straws I ordered from Etsy. These were set out in mason jars with lime green decorative balls in the bottom (I stole this idea from my sweet friend McKenna who did this at her wedding!) I also ordered our cupcake liners from this store.

For favors I kept it simple and baked sugar cookies and decorated them with a "1" and wrapped them up in cellophane with a mini pinwheel attached to a mini clothespin :)

I'm so glad we kept it low-key and were able to really enjoy the day and our sweet girl! Before you know it we'll be planning Jackson's first birthday party! Here are a few pictures of the day and details:

the birthday girl in her party dress!

the birthday girl playing in the kitchen

Favor table by door

close up of the sign

close up of the cookies

food spread :)

Close-up of a pinwheel

Pinwheel garland

Cupcakes

drink table

yummy dr.peppers

not so sure about her smash cake...

the one finger test, our girl doesn't really believe in smashing :)

not a fan

REALLY not a fan

OK, She's so over it.

one of the floral arrangements