First Birthday

So I'm finally getting around to gathering pictures from Juliana's first birthday party.

The theme was The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which arose after seeing an adorable party dress with an appliqué Caterpillar on the bottom. I had thought for the longest time that the theme would be SkippyJon Jones, with a Mexican feast for food, but then Juliana wasn't that into spicy foods, and the caterpillar dress was just too cute!

After browsing Pinterest, I came up with many of these party ideas. I made her invitations with Photoshop. And had it printed at PrintKeg.com in size 5x7 on flat card stock with white envelopes. For the return addresses, I had a matching design, but didn't worry about any additional images for the sending addresses.

 

I ordered fabric from the Eric Carle museum to make her party dress:
Front

 Back

Then I ordered window decal stickers from Amazon to put on the walls as additional decor:

I planned for 40 people (I think we ended up with 27?) food wise, so we got a sheet cake from Costco with a caterpillar design. I made Juliana a little cake using 4" round cake pans. The recipe for that cake is Betty Crocker's Strawberry Yogurt Cake, which was absolutely delicious. I had some Williams Sonoma Vanilla Bean icing left over from sugar cookies we made for Easter the weekend before, so I used that for her cake. I put the finished cake on one of the lids for one of her suction cup bowls, and used sprinkles to decorate it and put a "1" on the top.

I followed most of the foods from the book. I used extra address label stickers to print off images from the book for each of the menu items. I placed the stickers on colored construction paper to make table tents to label the foods.

 On the 3-tiered serving platter we had meat roll ups. We took turkey or ham slices, spread honey mustard or onion and chive cream cheese on one slice, placed a second slice on top, rolled up the meat, and then wrapped the meat in a lettuce leaf. We had crackers with a cheese and meat tray. Sliced veggies in clear cups placed down into ranch dressing.

I wanted watermelon for another thing, so Mom made a basket out of the watermelon shell and put in extra fruit.

 We put assorted fruit into ice cream cones: watermelon, cantaloupe and blueberries.

 As a "favor", I ordered lollipops from CandyWarehouse.com. We still have tons of these leftover, haha.

 Mom also brought Texas brownies (brownies with icing) in case guests didn't want the white Costco cake.

 Tasting her cake for the first time!

 She was careful with the top of the cake, but once she picked it up and dumped it over, she annihilated the bottom.

And lastly, a picture of her in her dress! She took a long (3 hours!) nap after this party was over!! We asked all the guests to sign a signature frame, and I've finally put in one of her birthday pictures and hung it up in her room.

Yeah, I don't think I can live up to this party again this year!! ;-)