"Up" Birthday Party

Little J doesn't watch a lot of TV yet, but Jared and I went ahead and assigned him a "favorite movie."  We like to think we know him pretty well, so our choice was easy:  Up!

This movie captured our hearts (and makes me sob uncontrollably - Jared too!) and was an obvious pick for our Babe's first birthday party theme.

I wanted to keep things simple (and inexpensive) so I focused on the balloon motif as my decorating inspiration.  We bought roughly 100 balloons, and foregoing the expensive helium tank rental, blew them up ourselves.  Because they weren't the "floaty" kind of balloons without the helium, I fond some balloon sticks to keep them upright. This was a fun process for everyone (except our sensitive puppies) and got us really geared up for the big party!

 

I knew that the balloons wouldn't be quite enough to represent our movie theme, so we got to work recreating the beloved "Karl & Ellie" mailbox.  My full mailbox project can be found here.  With the addition of some travel-themed decorative elements, I had my cupcake display table!

These are my favorite cupcakes (Jared teases me for advertising these "made from scratch" yummies).  The full recipe can be found here.  They are delicious.  I'm not kidding.

This little "personal" cake was meant for Little J to consume/smash/smear/throw during his party, but I lost track of time... and my Peanut's little cake ended up getting eaten by Jared.  But that's fine - he earned it after all the help and support he gave me during the party-prep process.

This final project was my pride and joy.  My full tutorial (competing with the amazing Martha Stewart) can be found here.  I can't emphasize my self-pride enough on this one.  This was a tricky project for me.

This party was a blast.  I look forward to planning birthday parties for my little ones every year!

The birthday boy and his sweet Nana

Mini Cupcake Balloons

This project was extremely time-consuming and frustrating - not at all how I expected after seeing the original idea from Martha Stewart.

I bought my water balloons and wooden skewers and started getting really excited about how cute these little babies would turn out.  But no matter how I tied the balloons around the sticks, they looked like this:

 

I tried so many alternative options (and wasted a lot of time and materials) but I was determined to make it work! 

Finally, I discovered a solution:

Step 1: Blow up water balloons and tie off. 

Step 2: Then trim the bulky, rolled-up part at the opening.

Step 3: Tie a piece of string above the knot.  The string must be longer than the coffee stirrer (which I used in place of skewers).

Step 4: Thread string through coffee stirrer and pull until knot becomes tightly wedged inside the straw.

Step 5: Trim off any excess string that sticks out of the straw.  The knot of the balloon is so snug inside the coffee stirrer that I promise the balloons won't detach easily.

 

My full "Up" Birthday Party post can be found here! Check it out!

Buckley Mailbox

This project was inspired by the "Karl & Ellie" mailbox from our favorite Pixar movie, Up!  This was a fun adventure for my little family, since it involved paint coming in contact with Little J's skin.

I found a really inexpensive (but sadly, plastic) white mailbox on Amazon.  I was really bummed by just how plastic-y it looked in person, so I played with some spray paint and came up with a solution.  I used a combination of a pearlescent white paint and a very shiny clear coat spray.

Before my spray paint treatment

protecting the little red flag from spray paint

Once the paint was dry, we got to work choosing our handprint colors.  I tried to keep our color scheme as similar to the movie mailbox as possible.  I mixed our colors myself, using acrylic (water-based) paint.  I absolutely do not recommend using oil-based paint for this kind of project, because it cannot be easily washed off of skin with water (it will usually require paint thinner).  Since my little baby was involved in the paint process, it was especially important to have easy cleanup :)

After our handprints and fancy writing dried, I sprayed the whole thing one more time with my clear coat spray.  This will protect our paint job from getting rubbed off or chipped.

The final product:

My full "Up" Birthday Party can be found here!  Check it out!