1st Birthday

It's incredible how time flies! My daughter turned one a few weeks ago, and we of course threw her a birthday party. A party of all parties. I had been scoping out ideas for months. We decided on a duck themed

party since that was her first word and she was mildly obsessed with ducks for months. With that theme I began to think of color schemes and after finding an image on another blog using olive green, persimmon, orange and yellow, I decided to use that scheme but change out the olive green for a bright pink. I ran with it!

I created invitations, favor tags, cake topper circles with a special one for hers, a banner, and a first birthday hat. For activities we had decorate your own ducks (found at orientaltrading.com), and a duck matching game floating her little baby pool (also found at orientaltrading.com). For favors I found little window boxes at the container store and filled them with a birthday rubber duck (orientaltrading.com), a bag of snack bunnies in varying flavors, and duck beak noise makers (hobby lobby).

The cake my husband and I made the night before. He had found a rainbow layered cake on tastespotting.com a while back and decided thats what he wanted to do for her party. It was a fun project, especially for an art major. We used 5 colors of professional bakers gel dye (available at craft stores or baking stores) and mixed them indifferent concentrations to get the colors. Of course we only had 6 baking pans so it took 3 batches in the oven, refrigerating the others in the meantime. The next day I iced it with store bought vanilla icing and placed it on a cake board that I wrapped with decorative paper matching the banner and birthday hat, then covered the whole thing in saran wrap.

Take a look, and let me know what you think. All of these pieces are available for your next kids party!