Kalia's First Birthday Party

Hard to believe my little girl turned one over two months ago.  She grows so much every single day, sometimes it seems that if I blink, I miss some milestone that happened!

I tried telling myself I was going to keep Kalia's First Birthday party simple.  I didn't want to spend a ton of money on it, and I wanted the decorations to be for Kalia...after all, it was her party.  While I succeeded in making it so my decorations didn't cost a lot of moola, staying true to myself, the decor wasn't exactly simple...but Kalia loved all of them, so overall, it was a success!

Forwarning, this post is an overload of pictures (aren't most of my posts?!?!)!  Special thanks to Erin and Chris for photographing Kalia's big day so Chris and I could just enjoy and celebrate.  Kalia's first year was filled with so much more laughs, cries, tribulations, joys, and absolute amazement than I ever thought possible!

When you walked in the front door, this is pretty much what you saw.  We hung crepe streamers from the pendant, which looked really cool at night, sort of okay during the day.  Kalia thought it was amazing though, so that's what counted.

We blew up these balloons using our air compressor, and then threaded a needle through the bottom part of the balloon and pushed all of these along clear fishing wire.  We used clear tape (with no adverse affects) to tape where the balloons crossed.  Kalia would stare up at these balloons and say "ba! ba! ba!" all.day.long.  The girl loves her some balloons!

I also printed out the Happy Birthday Kalia banner, cut it out using my straight line cutter thing a ma bob (technical term for it!), used my hole punch to put holes on both sides of the letter, and then strung ribbon through it.  I taped the back of the ribbon to keep it all in place.  More than likely, you'll see that banner for future birthday parties as well!

Then, of course, there's the chalk wall with the window ledges we built and a bunch of our favorite pictures from Kalia's first year.

If you looked to the left of the front door when you walked in, you saw this :

You can see the gifts chalk sign I made letting guests know where to drop them off.  We blew up balloons and shoved them in-between the dining room chandelier and twisted crepe paper and hung it around the dining room.  Kalia loved this too.  Her eyes were drawn up for most of the week leading up to her party!  The entire cost to decorate both of these rooms was $12.  Not too bad, eh?

Here's a better look straight on :

The basket to the left (the table and basket don't normally live there) held the party favors for the wee ones.  

I took inexpensive frames, fabri-tacked the back of them with fabric (pink for the girls, blue for the boys), and wrote the kids name on them in either pink or blue (again, girl or boy).  For the most part, I actually had pictures of Kalia with the kiddo to put into the frames, but there were a few cases where the picture frame just held a blank sheet of photo paper with instructions on how to insert another picture in it's place.  I glued twine to one side of the fabric, and then just pushed the backing shut after punching a hole through the center of the picture.  Here's a blank one so you get the general idea.  Imagine Kalia + a kid named Blake on that blank sheet of photo paper though!

 

 The mammoth project of the entire birthday party was this giant number one.  I initially tried to tape pictures in the shape of a one on the wall, and got about three pictures in before Chris told me that was ridiculous and went out to the garage and made me a cutout from some old cardboard boxes we had lying around.  The bottom is actually taped on, but you wouldn't know with the pictures covering it.  The top left was the most recent pictures and it went all the way down to the very beginning days of having Kalia home.  This took a lot of time, but brought back so many fun memories.

To be 100% honest, this is still hanging in my dining room!  Kalia goes up to it all day long and points out "Daddy!", "Momma!" and "Kodi!".  I'll take it down and put these pictures in a photo album at some point, but probably not until I get to work on a project to replace it.  Which might not be until she's two.  Oh well, my house, I'm okay with it!  I actually love to look at it too.

If you remember from Kalia's invites, the only sort of "theme" I had going on was pictures.  I was successful at taking pictures every week of Kalia in her rocking chair with her pink pillow, and hung them around the pool deck in a clothes pin line.

It's amazing to me to look back at those weekly pictures and see how much change occured every.single.week.  When you're living in the moment, it seems like everything is the same, and then it's just...not...but documenting it week by week was something I'm really happy I can look back at.

 Kalia absolutely loves the water.  She's a little fish in there, so for activities, we just stuck to splashing around in the pool.  Kalia couldn't have been happier!

I think Chris might of had just as much fun as Kalia did!

 ...of course there were the chalk signs and fabric heart with Kalia's name on it too...

For the food, we kept it simple.  We did sandwiches on fancy bread/bun things, fruit, and numerous other side dishes that family brought (thanks awesome parents!!).

Of course there were desserts.  Anyone that knows me in real life knows that I can't bake worth a darn.  My wonderful sister-in-law made these amazing cake pops that were a huge hit!

 

Her amazing mother made these deliciously cute cupcakes (good baking must run in their family ... my Mom can bake, I'm a mess, she didn't pass that gene down to me!)...

...and my amazing mother in law made these scrumptious cookies.  Can you believe it was Chris's idea to stack them this way before people showed up?  Love that man!

Kalia, of course, had her smash cake.  I actually attempted to bake one the night before, but after you could throw it against the wall and put a dent in it, I called Publix and paid the $10 for a wee cake.  Kalia was initially overwhelmed at everyone singing to her...

...but quickly got over it and dug in.  She actually didn't like her cake though - she's not a fan of sugar just yet, and I plan to keep that up as long as possible!

Yay!  The party was a success!

I'll end on a family photo from the end of the party.  We had such a blast celebrating making it through the first year of Kalia's life.  Some days we were in survival mode, but every day I'm thankful for.  We are so blessed to have such a healthy, happy, and fun little girl.  I wouldn't change one single thing for the world!

Gah, love both of them so much!!!  So what do you guys think of the decor?  It was a little time intensive, but Kalia loved it, so it was definitely worth it!

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed reader to get future posts delivered to your reader.

Linking up to the parties on my sidebar, go check out everyone else's DIY parties!

I'm an idiot and a chalk wall

This past weekend we went on a cleaning spree.  Kalia had been sick pretty much since her first birthday party (her one year check up was that Monday - I'm pretty sure she caught it there - darn not first thing in the morning appointments!), so once she started sort of being on the up and up, I felt the need to sanitize everything.  And I do mean everything.  Like 3300 + square feet of everything.

Yeah, I know, still doesn't explain why I'm an idiot...I'm getting there.

We started in the living room and conditioned the leather, dusted every single surface and every single thing on the surface, cleaned the fans, the baseboards, you name it, it got cleaned.  Then we moved onto the kitchen and Chris even took everything out of our pantry and cleaned and re-organized it.  So Saturday was busy busy busy with taking turns playing with Kalia and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.  It was past 11 when we deemed the house done enough for the night and headed to bed.  Kalia wakes up at 530 a.m.(oiy!).

Sunday we started on the cleaning kick again (I know, we're totally the life of the party these days), and I think all of the cleaning chemicals and sheer exhaustion must have gotten to my brain by the time Kalia woke up from her first nap.

We took down the balloons we used as decor for Kalia's birthday party the night before (decorations post coming soon, promise) and decided to leave them in Kalia's playroom for a few days because she has a thing for balloons.  Apparently so do we.

When she woke up, we all went in the the playroom to have some family playtime (we try to make sure we both play with her at least once a day on the weekends instead of constantly trading off).  Chris decided a fun game would be to spike the balloons off of Kalia's head.  Kalia could have cared less.  Me, on the other hand, took issue (playfully!) with him spiking balloons off of my little girls head, so I decided I would spike the balloons of off his head for Kalia.

Chris, also, could have cared less.

I guess I thought I'd really show him if I spiked it closer and harder.

A balloon.

Really??

So I tossed my balloon up, and impatiently waited for it to float itself back down so I could spike it as hard as I could into the back of Chris's head.  I swung through the balloon as hard as I could and in my follow through (because now I was entirely too close), I hit my middle finger on the back of Chris's shoulder.

Snap.

Such.an.idiot.

The conversation from there went something like this :

Chris : "Ow Kara, that really hurt my shoulder!"

Me : "FFF!!!!"

Kalia : "Baa!  Baa!! BAAAA!!!!"  (Everything she's happy at is either ba or da)
Chris : "What'd you hit me with??"
Me : (Hunched over holding me hand) "Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!!!!!"
Kalia : "BAAAAA!!!!!!"
Chris : "Seriously, what'd you hit me with??"
Me : "My . middle . finger.  I'm.pretty.sure.it's.broken.  Ow, ow, ow."
Chris: "Are you serious??"  takes a look at it.  "Yep, you're serious.  That sucks.  Guess my shoulder doesn't hurt so bad anymore.  How do you do these things Kara???"

Kalia : "BAAAAA!!!!!!  BAAAAA!!!"


Seriously, I am such an idiot.  The sad thing is it is typical me.  I build stuff, move trees, and think I have He-man strength when it comes to most anything, but I can't even spike a freaking balloon without breaking something.

Anyways, the point in writing that is that if I have typos, ignore them (I'm trying to type sans middle finger), and I'm behind on my posts because it takes forever to type them.  Please forgive me for lack of responses on my comments as well, I'm getting there!

Whew...that took forever.  Now, onto less idiotic things...like a chalk wall!

That's right, my walls can talk!  Well, I guess they can't talk per say, but you can read them now!  I've wanted to do a chalk wall somewhere in the house for a long long time.  I told Chris before we were even pregnant that when we had babies, one of the walls was becoming chalk.  He said no, but eventually I broke him down (some tasks take longer to break his disapproval of than others).

The large wall with nothing on it in Kalia's playroom screamed "pick me, pick me!!!" for a chalk wall.  And I listened.

Yeah, those cleaning chemicals are still getting to me...

I'm not gonna lie, painting that huge wall that you see when you first walk into our house black, was daunting.  But, like I said, the wall told me to paint it, so what am I supposed to do?  Ignore crazy talking walls?  No way, not this gal.

I'm losing it, I know.  Must.sleep.

We sanded prior to painting.  If I had to do this over again, I'd sand more thoroughly.  It's hard not to rush through projects with a wee one in tow, but chalkboards are supposed to be like butter, and ours is a little more cottage cheese like.  Still fun, and still totally function able, but for those of you that haven't gotten on the chalk wall train and plan on it, sand, sand, sand!

You can see the original color the previous owners had this room.  Lavendar.  With a pink pool deck.  I have no idea what they were thinking.  Moving on...

I painted three coats of the chalkboard paint on.

The paint looked super streaky, but wound up drying just fine.

After all the coats were dry, I primed / conditioned the wall.  Holy foreverness.  I was kind of dumb (theme of this post I think), and used a tiny thin piece of chalk to do this.  Well, like three of them by the time I was done.  I smartened up for Kalia's birthday party and bought big fat chalk, but I initially only bought the skinny white dustless chalk.  They really should call it less dust chalk instead of dustless.  Chalk is dust.  It doesn't give off as much dust as the big fat ones do, but it still creates dust, so don't let it fool you!

I attempted to erase the entire 16' wall with a tiny tiny felt eraser.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  Again.  Holy foreverness, again.  At that point I was feeling a little silly, and sent Chris this picture:

Minus taking forever, the felt eraser didn't really erase it so well either.

At this point, I think Chris was majorly regretting letting me wear him down over the chalk wall.  But after going back over it with a thin dust towel that is now our official eraser for the wall, we were both really happy with the outcome.

I didn't leave the crooked paint line as our finish for the top of the chalk wall, but I can't show you in this post what I finished it off with.  My finger hurts too badly, and this post is long enough!

The kids had fun drawing on the chalk wall at Kalia's birthday party, and Kalia and I have had fun on it since then.  Or maybe I've had fun and Kalia's had fun eating chalk.  I know, the poor girl doesn't stand a chance. Sigh...

But she'll have fun on it soon enough!  Has anybody tried those chalk ink pens on chalk walls?  I'm really curious to know how those work and if they erase well or leave etchings behind.  Let me know if you've tried it out!

So what do you think?  Well, besides I'm an idiot ... I mean of our new chalk wall, not of me!  (Dear all of my lovely family members, no comments necessary on the idiot front!!)  This was one of those projects that wasn't exactly for her birthday party, but I wanted to have done before the big day arrived.

Hope everyone is having a great week!  Happy Hump Day!

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed reader to get future posts delivered to your reader.


I'm linking up to the parties on my sidebar, go checkout what everyone else is up to for great inspiration! 

Kalia's First Birthday Party : Chalk Signs

I showed you the fabric heart I did yesterday.  I mentioned that my vision for the fabric heart was to use it as a photo booth.

I not only wanted to capture pictures of the guests, but I also wanted them to be able to write messages to Kalia as well.  It'll be a lot of fun to look back at these years down the road.  So next up on the project list was chalk signs!

Lucky me, we had an old dresser that had seen much better days and was on it's way out to the street.  We pulled out the drawers to take some of the weight off, and a lightbulb went of in my head.  (Yes Dad, that happens every now and then).  I needed thin wood to make my chalkboard signs for the party, and the bottom of the dresser was made with thin wood.  Score!!

I took apart the dressers and drew out my various shapes onto the wood.

And then got to cutting with my jig saw.

After I cut out all of my shapes...

(no in process pictures from here on, sorry!  naptimes were flying by!), I did two layers of chalk paint over each of them.

My sister in law has a whole lot prettier hand writing, so she wrote a message for the guests instructing them what to do with the chalk signs and the photo wall.

We left out some chalk, and left my point and shoot camera sitting on the table.

I taped balloons to the ceiling so that the photo wall felt more secluded, and then added curling ribbon to the bottoms of the balloons.  So much cheaper than using helium balloons! I added the accordion scrap paper things in the background after doing some test shots and deciding the wall was missing something.  The guests did the rest.

I cut out one of the signs to look like a stop sign and hung it from Kalia's playroom with rules on it.  We've had some not fun experiences with those mats and food and shoes!

I also used a sign to tell guests where to leave the gifts.  I'll show the full decor later, but for now, here's a cropped shot of the gifts sign :

So what do you think of my photo wall?  We had fun with it, and I know those pictures will be so fun to look back at one day!

While I'm on the topic of pictures, thanks so much to Erin and Chris for gifting Kalia with photographing her first Birthday party.  They take such great pictures, and did an amazing job capturing all of the details and moments so Chris and I could just enjoy the celebration!

Hope everyone has a great weekend!  More Birthday posts coming soon!

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed reader to get future posts delivered to your reader.

Kalia's First Birthday Party : Fabric Heart

I have about a million posts to write on everything I did for Kalia's First Birthday Party.  I kept the decor pretty inexpensive, more work on my part than actual cost.

I'm not really good on 'themes' with parties.  For a baby shower I was helping throw, one of the girls asked what kind of theme we wanted to go with (I was in charge of decorations) and I said "baby".  When they said, yeah, but what kind of baby theme, I replied with "baby girl."  For my own wedding, when the florist asked what kind of flowers I wanted, I said "pretty ones".  When it comes to parties / events, I'm not really big into themes, I just want everything to mean something and look cool.  Does that count as a theme??

But for Kalia's invites I sent out, I used pictures, so I guess that was sort of my theme.  I decided to mimic her nursery colors of both blue and pink as well, and went forward with a game plan from there.  I am a little crazy about pictures...especially of Kalia.  I have always loved capturing moments, so I decided to incorporate some of that into the party decor / events as well.

I've seen photo booths used at events before, so I wanted to recreate something like that, but a lot less pricey, and something relating back to Kalia.  So here's what I did :

I picked up a large piece of clearance fabric, and had Chris hold it up where I wanted it to go to make sure the empty wall I was putting it on didn't dwarf the fabric.

Then I drew a large heart in chalk on the fabric.

I used Kalia's ottoman from her nursery to trace the circular parts of the heart, and then a ruler to draw the straight part.

After that, I took a pink and a blue paint pen and got to writing Kalia's name.  Over.and over.and over again.  I sort of felt like I was in elementary school and had gotten in trouble and had to write my name on the chalk board about a million times.

In all honesty, it took me probably about 15 minutes to write it out.  It just seemed like a lot longer than that!

The fabric needed a large frame to go in, and there is no way I'm dishing out the cash for one of those, so I made one.  I wanted the frame to have a little more detail than my normal picture frames, so I whipped out my router tool for the first time.  That thing is amazing.  So easy and so fun to use!  Here's an in action shot :

and here's what the wood looked like afterwards.

I initially glazed the frame to bring out my routing detail, but the glaze just didn't go with Kalia's fabric heart, so I nixed that.  After I nailed the large frame together, I gave her a few coats of white spray paint.

From there, I just stapled the fabric to the back of the frame.  I can't decide if I want to reuse the frame for something else, so I didn't put too many staples in it.  In hindsight, I should have either glued the fabric around it and cut it off, or just gotten over it and put enough staples to pull it tight.  The fabric wrinkled a bit more than I would have liked.  Overall though, I was still happy with the final product.

Besides this being the photo wall, we also did Kalia's smash cake using this as the back drop.

Kalia wasn't sure what to think of the 40 people singing Happy Birthday to her!  I'll have more in action shots of the photo wall coming up shortly, so stay tuned for that.

Hope everyone's had a great week so far!

If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed reader to get future posts delivered to your reader.