Colorful Birthday Party – Pinwheels and Polka-Dots

February 17th, 2010

My daughter Grace turned two a couple of weeks ago (she and Oprah have the same birthday, how lucky for Oprah ) so we threw her a ‘colorful’ birthday party topped off with what else?  Cupcakes!  I drew inspiration for the decorations from some of my new favorite addictions…blogs!  I know I’m a bit behind on this bandwagon – I admit for awhile I was slightly anti-blog, just give me an old fashioned magazine.  But recently I’ve discovered some great sites that I can’t stay away from so be sure to check them out as I give them ‘props’ below.

One thing you’ll learn about me through this posting is I’m a bit cheap.  Well, ask my sister Joy and she’ll say ‘A BIT??’  Okay, okay – I’m CHEAP!  Like, when I order something online I save the packing paper that comes with it to recycle and use to ship your towers out…like, I pulled out all of the tissue paper from Grace’s gifts to re-use – TISSUE PAPER folks.  Shameless, I know.  But sometimes my ‘thrifty-ness’ just forces me to be a bit creative like with the ‘Happy Birthday Grace’  balloon banner pictured above.  I bought the balloons at the Dollar Store (the kind where everything really truly is $1).  I barely blew them up (by the way, for a quick laugh picture the very pregnant ME blowing these puppies up).  I printed out the letters on  my computer, cut them out and taped them to the balloons. Voila.  Super cute colorful banner for $1.

For ‘favors’ I had to consider that the kids would be ranging in age from 1 – 12 so any ‘toy’ idea was out.  Luckily my recent addiction to blogging exposed me to these Dipped Oreo Cookie Suckers on the fabulous site ‘How Does She’.  They were a HIT and I’m pretty sure the adults were jealous.  The bags were another Dollar Store find (my memory might be off here but I think they came in packs of 3) as were the pinwheels (also packs of 3?).  I filled the bottom of the bags with multi-colored jelly beans and that was that.

For decorations I wanted pom poms which you can buy on Etsy, or I think the craft stores sell kits as well.  Orrrrr, you can buy some tissue paper at (drumroll please) the Dollar Store and make them yourself!  They are time consuming but otherwise fairly simple.  Here’s a great tutorial I found on Casasugar.  The idea for the juice boxes with crazy straws (Dollar Store and Dollar Store!) just came to me and wound up so cute and colorful.

Last, but certainly not least was The Cupcake Tower.  I chose the Turquoise Ribbon, one of our newer selections and definitely one of my favorites.  It was an accident that the pom became the ‘topper’ as I literally set it there for a second to get it out of the way and decided it was too cute to take it off!  I made 4 different kinds of cupcakes (chocolate, gluten-free chocolate, lemon and vanilla) and spread them with various flavors of frosting (chocolate, chocolate peanut-butter, lemon buttercream and vanilla buttercream).  It was a full day of cupcake baking with perhaps one or two meltdowns along the way but let’s face it, I’m very pregnant so it wasn’t torture.  My favoite part was using our new pastry bags to decorate them with, I need a lot more practice than the 100 that I frosted here but they were by far my prettiest cupcakes to date!

Overall – the day made for one happy two year old and I had a blast putting it all together.  Happy Birthday Baby Girl.