I'm finally getting around to posting about my son's first birthday party! This year his birthday fell on the day before the Super Bowl, so it was only fitting to do a football party. I made everything using My Digital Studio. I had a lot of party ideas saved on Pinterest, so it was fun to be able to finally put them to use!
Here are his invitations, which were made to look like football tickets!
This was the dessert table. My friend Carrie made the football shaped cupcakes! On the right is his baby flip book, made with MDS. It is 50 pages long and covers his entire first year. It was a big hit! Hanging behind everything were his monthly pictures, hunt with mini clothes pins. Also on the table is his hospital shadow box and birth print that I made. The cookies were green candy covered oreos piped with white icing to look like field markers.
Here is a close up of the cookies and the baby book.
Water bottle labels made with MDS. (as you can tell by the Christmas decorations, I had been working on party stuff for a while! My dining room table looked like a football party exploded!)
These were the favors. I ran the bags through my printer with a football play I found on Google. It's hard to read, but the sticker says "We would like to call a time out to say thank you". The lighting wasn't great in my dining room, but I promise you could read it. Everyone also got a pencil that had footballs on it and said "Slevin's First Birthday" that I ordered from Oriental Trading.
Inside the bags were Hershey's nuggets that I had wrapped in labels that I made. Such an easy way to personalize favors :)
This was the entry to the party room. I made the chalk sign by painting a piece of thick cardboard with chalkboard paint.
This was the backdrop behind the foot table! It took FOREVER to hang all of those balloons and streamers, but it was so worth it! You can also see off to the right a chain that I had made from brown strips of paper and painted white "laces" on. There were two of those, but I forgot to get a close up of them.
Here is what the room looked like!
This was Slevin's seat! I made his party hat from felt and little pom poms. I also made his sign using MDS. It says "Reserved for the Quarterback". You can see it better in the next picture.
And, as you can see, he wasn't too thrilled about people singing to him! haha
Deviled "football" eggs! Thanks to my sister for cutting all the chives for these!
Here is me and the birthday boy! :) I can't believe he is 1!!
These are his thank you cards, also made with MDS. I wrote a personal message to each person on the back.
This is the card I made for Mila's 1st Birthday. It felt good to pull out some of my old card stuff and actually make a card by hand and not on the computer (although, I think it's obvious how much I love MDS!). This card is actually 5x7 and the only reason I made it that big is because that was the only size envelope I had :). I cut a doily in half and wrapped it around the pink cardstock and adhered it to the back. I then cut the banner strips from Stampin' Up Designer Series Paper and added the pearls. The ribbon was tied on and the sentiment was stamped using Chocolate Chip ink. You can't tell from the picture, but the pink cardstock is adhered with dimensionals. The sentiment is from the "Crazy for Cupcakes" stamp set.
I absolutely love this theme! This is my friend, April's, little boy and he just turned 2. She took him to her dad's work to get some pictures of him playing with the machinery and getting dirty with his little dump truck. She sent me like 20 pictures and I had to narrow it down...they were all so cute! So I definitely had to create a layout for an invitation that included multiple pictures. As always I used MDS and I made these 5x7 so that I could make the picutres bigger. I think what really makes these invitations is the font. To me a font can make or break a design and sometimes that is the hardest thing for me. I have my favorite ones that I always seem to gravitate towards, but I knew this one had to be different; and no joke, this was the first one I tried. It's called "Cracked". So cute! I also like the push pins. They really look 3D! I actually found it on a Yahoo image search and it was red. I used the recolor tool to make yellow and black ones and then rotated them so that the shadow was in a different position, creating the illusion that they are pushed in different ways. That program is amazing! The only thing I don't like is how dark the writing is over the grey background, I probably should have used a different color or made the background a little opaque, but you can still read it, so I guess that's okay. It just doesn't stand out like I imagined it would. 
This might be one of my favorite birthday invitations I've made yet! These were for a polka dot birthday party and I love all of the bright colors! I used MDS, as usual, to create everything. The "1" is a clip art that I found online because I couldn't find a font thick enough, even when enlarged, to fit the info in. I think playing with fonts and using various fonts on the same project is one of my favorite things to do!
You may remember this post from Trinity's Lalaloopsy party last year. Well, guess who had another Lala themed party this year?! Her mom lucked out because now there are actually decorations with Lalaloopsy on them. Everything at the party was super cute. I didn't want to show up without a homemade gift, so I decided to make Trinity something that no one else could buy her...a Lalaloopsy candle with her name on it! Candle making is very easy. You can do it one of two ways: either stamp on a piece of tissue paper or run the tissue paper through your printer (taped to a regular piece of paper) -- for this project, I printed the image. Then cut the image out, getting as close to the image as you can. Position it on the candle and then wrap a piece of waxed paper around the candle and pull it tight in the back. Hold the candle by the waxed paper that is left over in the back and use an embossing gun to slowly heat over the image. It will take 1-2 minutes, but gradually you will see the image magically melt into the candle. Be careful to not overheat. Slowly peel away the waxed paper and that's it! If needed, you can heat over the image slightly to fix any places that the tissue didn't completely melt. 
