Imprintalish: birthday

Since I posted Westyn's first birthday party photos I've been getting a lot of questions about some of the crafty decor, so I thought I would give you a more in depth post on the how to's that were involved. Most all of the projects were made with supplies that I had on hand to keep costs down...

Scrap Fabric Wreath

Start with a crap load of fabric scraps! I did have quite a few fabric leftovers on hand, but I also bought some too. I went to Tonic Living and picked out a bunch of coordinating fabric samples for $1 each and then went to work. I cut them all into small strips, maybe about 4 inches long{ish}.

I found some random wire in the basement (thick enough to hold, thin enough to bend by hand) and shaped it into a circle.

Then I started tying...

For the monogrammed initial, I painted a small wooden letter that I got at the Dollar Store and glued it to two circles cut out of scrapbooking paper. I pushed the fabric ties out of the way and secured the embellishment with a piece of thread.

Voila! I still have it up now too, I just removed the 'W' and it looks so springy on our door!

Fabric Bunting

Actually the fabric samples that I mentioned above were originally bought for this bunting I wanted to make (it's now in Westyn's room), the scrap fabric wreath was an after thought to the bunting since I had some material leftover. For the bunting I just cut out triangles and sewed them together with a yellow binding.

Ruffled Streamers

I originally saw these ruffled streamers on Pinterest and fell in love! They were so easy to do (you just need some thread and a sewing machine!) Go {here} for the full tutorial.

The Cake

I did not make the cake {sort of}! I love baking, but really, I didn't want to worry about having to make the cake, plus I found this beautiful photo of a cake that was so cute! It had little cars along the bottom and a cute number 1 on the top. So we got someone to make it (she made my 30th birthday cake-I loved it). Well...long story short. The cake looked like poop. The only thing that looked like the photo was the color of the blue icing. My three year old could have drawn better cars and worst of all the cars and icing were PINK! She said she couldn't get the icing to go red...URG! The number one on top was just a red candle and totally clashed and made the pink cars look even pinker! So I scrambled last minute, peeled off the cars (ate them-obviously) and slapped some whipped white icing along the bottom to cover up where the cars were and since it was Easter, popped some jelly beans along the edge. Put a new candle on the top that didn't emphasize the pink letters and there you have it-Westyn's first cake!

Photo Timeline Banner

I was totally inspired by Emily at 52 Mantels by her Year One Timeline that she made for her daughter's first birthday. For mine, I picked one photo to represent each month (that took hours-LOL!) and then cropped each photo into a 5x7 triangle. I use Photoshop for all my photo stuff and for this project I used the Clipping Mask to cut out the triangle area. For the circles I used the bottom of a glass (I was too lazy to look for my circle cutter!) and traced it out onto coordinating scrapbooking paper. Then after cutting each one out I ran them through the sewing machine in chronological order. Wrote the months on the circles and then attached it to a bare frame!

And that's that...Happy Wednesday!