The First Birthday - The Details

Since Ella Kate hasn't really started to show interest in any one thing in particular, we decided to not have a real theme to her party.  I went with a cupcake/polka dot/bright color type theme and I think it came out really cute.

I had a friend of mine from college do the birthday invites.  I thought I still had a picture of them, but I can't seem to find it.  The only things I told her to include were the colors turquoise and pink, and to put a cupcake somewhere on there.  She did exactly what I asked and they came out great.  If you need invites you should definitely visit her site on etsy. Edited to add: Ella's invites were featured on her blog yesterday - check them out here.

For the drink table, we did a big pitcher of tea and served all the soft drinks out of big plastic tubs. 

 The tubs worked great!  They luckily didn't sweat and really held quite a few drinks and still looked cute without having to use plain ice chests.  Courtney made the tissue pom poms to help add a little extra color to the table and I think they added just enough pop!

Being that my mom is quite the craft person I put her in charge of Ella's birthday banner.

 We decided to hang it above the food table and she did a great job on it!  We just traced the letters on scrapbook paper and attached it to plain cardstock.  I have seen many of these online that you can order but it was definitely cheaper buying it.

For food we decided to just do finger foods since the party started at 2.  We did make your own sandwiches on some great Brioche bread, veggie tray, 7 layer mexican dip, and spinach dip.  Just the right amount of food!

I really wanted to showcase pictures of Ella from the past 11 months.  I had been keeping up with taking her picture each month on her month birthday so I decided to make another banner utilizing those pictures.  Unfortunately I didn't get an up close picture of it but you can see it here.

 I also decided to frame some pictures from her newborn, 3 month, 6 month, and 9 month photo shoots.  I used some polka dot scrapbook paper to frame them out and just used cheap plastic frames.  I just can't believe how much she has changed and you can really see that when all those pictures are right up next to eachother.

 Since part of my theme was cupcakes, I decided to forgo the traditional birthday cake and go with cupcakes instead.  It was great for me cause then I didn't have to worry about having to cut the cake which I hate doing.  I ordered custom cupcake toppers from etsy and they did a great job with them.  They were able to duplicate somewhat the cupcake from the invitations to bring it all together. They also did the favor tags to go on the treat bags to match.

 We of course had to have a smash cake just for the little one!  More to come on that in the next post.