My youngest babe recently turned ONE! It feels as though we just brought her home from the hospital. We blinked and our sweet baby is now one years old. How can one year go by so fast?! So many precious snuggles and smiles. I think a first birthday party is an extra special birthday...recognizing the blessing of her sweet life and cherishing such rapid and amazing change: sitting, smiling, clapping, walking....! But also a bittersweet farewell to the tender itty bitty baby stage. For our special party we held a small family gathering to celebrate. But we did not go small for her first birthday party decorations! My kids parties are usually some form of an experiment. I'm typically trying out new products, ideas, colors, style and I cross my fingers it all comes together. Many of these items are available or will be available in our shop! I would love to hear what you think! The original party inspiration came from this little sundress by Boden that I fell in love with. They have the cutest kids clothes! I chose to decorate with the banana leaf green, light pink, and bright pink with a few pops of bright yellow. We incorporated a variety of different balloons. We used an adorable polka dot pink balloon and added some tassels in our party colors. I combined some of our popular gold glitter balloons with some solid color balloons in her party colors. We treated our glitter balloons with hi-float following our tutorial. Indoors, we created a huge balloon arch! We secured it over the windows of our great room, it turned out fabulous. I really love balloon arches as decor, they are super easy to put together and require virtually no skill or artistic ability! They do not require any helium, saving you from having to add that to the party tab too. I like to plan all the details of my parties out way in advance and decorating last minute drives me insane. Especially racing out at the last minute to fill up party balloons. With these arches, you can prep them in advance (a day or 2 is fine). Whew, and take some stress out of the last minute party preparation. I spelled out "sydney is one" using our gold glitter alphabet letter garland kit. I used 4 shades of pink balloons to create this and tropical faux banana leaves tied and taped into place. Our arch was approximately 12 ft. long and contained 95 balloons in 3 different sizes. These balloon arches are getting so popular and they really are a impressive decoration. The secret is, they are easy! Especially with a DIY balloon arch kit! I hung our new fringed streamers from our windows to create a fun backdrop, add interest and color. They are ready to use and come in a variety of colors (shown here: cream, white, orange, yellow, fuchsia and light pink). Outdoors we decorated too! We set up Sydney's Land of Nod golden teepee complete with streamers, paper flowers, honeycomb balls, jumbo balloon + tassels and white gold one balloon. I love how it turned out. To create this backdrop, we secured our shop's florals to a simple PVC pipe backdrop. I purchased ours, but you can easily make one using various online tutorials. After, we taped streamers in metallic gold, white and shades of pink to the top. I adore how they flutter in the wind! We used some adorable gold star balloon weights too- which I totally love. If you remember the last time you had balloons filled at the party store....when they are done inflating your lovely balloon they tie a clunky, ugly balloon wieight to the bottom of your pretty balloon that almost never matches the balloon up top. This is why these gold balloon weights have me swooning! I found a local bakery to make an amazing pink sprinkle cake! It was almost too cute to eat. The adorable ONE cake topper was made by The Vintage Event. Happy birthday baby girl!
