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As emotional as I was about Daisy turning one, I quickly realized that planning baby/kids birthday parties is totally my jam! I had so much fun crafting, baking, and decorating, and I’m so excited to share all of the details!
Retro Floral/Daisy Theme
I feel like a first birthday is the best (or only) time to do a theme that you are passionate about, before your child has their own theme interests, so we decided to roll with the flower theme of her name and nursery, and added a little bit of a retro spin on it! Daisy is also the only one in our little family to have a summer birthday, so that was part of the inspiration for the floral theme. Since we don’t have any backyard space at our house, my in-laws offered to host in their gorgeous backyard, which was the most perfect size and space!
I created the invites in Canva, and sent them out via text. If you like our invitation design, you can use the template here!
Crafts + decor!
I had so much fun crafting a few things for the party! I knew I wanted to keep things relatively budget friendly, because it’s so easy to go overboard, so I tried to use as many supplies as I could that we already had on hand.
I’m really happy with how the wooden signs turned out! I used 1/4inch plywood that we had leftover in our garage for both signs. I stole the idea for the milestone sign from my IG friend Alexis, and used our monthly milestone plaques underneath each monthly photo we took! I used my cricut to cut her name and flowers out of vinyl, and then just painters tape to secure everything. I ordered the square photos from Blacks.ca and they came super quickly. I feel like even if you don’t have a cricut, this is an easy craft! You could easily write out the name with a paint pen, or order a wooden script name sign and then all you have to do is attach things!
The smaller sign was a combination of cricut vinyl and paint pen, and we had so much fun coming up with all of the categories and brainstorming all of her favourite things. We also put together a little trivia game to play using some of the answers found on the sign! So people who paid attention to the crafts ended up doing really well in trivia! 😉
The other simple craft that we made was her little high chair banner! My mother-in-law made the tassels, and I made the little felt daisies, following the same process as I did for her nursery mobile. It turned out really cute, and was a lot more cost effective than buying one online. But there are some really cute ones out there too!
Cookie Favours!
Again, keeping with the budget friendly theme, I wanted to do something for our friends and family to take home, so I decided to try my hand at cookie decorating! My friend Kyra suggested this recipe for sugar cookies and royal icing, and I would definitely recommend it! I have never decorated cookies before, so we did a practice run and they turned out really well. They turned out to be like a sugar cookie/shortbread hybrid, and I added a little bit of orange zest to spice things up a bit! So delicious!
I decided to go with this daisy cookie cutter, and this #1 cutter. The decorating part took quite a long time, but it was totally worth it! They looked so cute! I unfortunately didn’t get any pictures of the favours, but I ended up wrapping up two cookies per person in little clear treat bags, and secured them with a daisy sticker that I cut with my cricut. I don’t know if people were just being polite, but they said they loved them!
Misc. Decor + Games
I had planned on keeping things pretty simple and doing a few balloons here and there, but the day before the party I logged onto Facebook Marketplace and saw that someone had a Daisy party the weekend prior and still had all of the balloons they used in really good condition! So we paid $20 for a pre-constructed balloon arch and a bunch of daisy balloons and they looked so good! So if you aren’t picky about balloon colours, I highly recommend checking marketplace! Or if you have leftover decorations in good condition it doesn’t hurt to see if anyone else can use them! I loved that we were able to reuse something that would have otherwise been waste, and we also saved a ton of time blowing up balloons! I did find some similar daisy balloons here though, and the regular balloons were a mix of pinks and peach colours.
Since a lot of people coming to the party didn’t actually get to see Daisy that much in person early on because of the pandemic, I wanted to have lots of photos of her throughout the year. The gazebo was the perfect place to string string them up, and I used a combination of string, and this fun banner I stole from her room that we got from Cocovillage.
We had a couple kiddos at the party, so I wanted to have a few simple activities or games for them. We had a mini blow up pool with Daisies on it that we got from Indigo, and we also put out her water table and a few toys/blocks for the kids to play with. We also had a little table that we put a bunch of bubbles on, and I had some back-up crafting supplies as a rain plan that we didn’t end up needing.
We have also been really good about filling out Daisy’s baby book, so we brought it for people to look through, but also used its blank pages as a guest book so that we could record who was at her first birthday!
Smash Cake
We wanted to do a simple healthy smash cake for daisy, so I used this recipe that I found on Pinterest, and it turned out really well! She seemed to like the taste, and it looked cute minimally iced with a simple cake topper. It was a bit of extra work as opposed to buying a pre-made cake, but it was so cute to watch her dig into it and I didn’t have to worry about the sugar content.
Overall it was such a great day, and my only regret is not getting more photos! We were super busy though and had a ton of fun catching up with family and friends, so it was totally worth it!
Happy party planning!! Cheers!
Julie
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