The Very Hungry Caterpillar First Birthday Party

I'll get back to my living room redecorating later this week.  Until then, here's my son's first birthday party.

We kept it pretty simple and only spent about $40 on the decorations and paper goods.

The party was a couple months ago and it was such a sweet time to celebrate with family.  We even had my husband's parents, sister and our niece drive up all the way from Louisiana to be with our little guy on his special day.

We had had the date for the party all lined up since November, but I hadn't planned a single thing until the party was about 3 weeks away.  A girl I work with, whose son turned one about six weeks before mine, told me about their Very Hungry Caterpillar party and the idea just stuck in my head.  When the party was two and a half weeks away I decided I should start looking for some invitations.  At first I looked at Etsy.  I was planning on doing the whole print your own thing.  I soon realized that most Etsy vendors required payment by PayPal (confession:  I've never bought anything from Etsy :-/).  I didn't want to go through the hassle of setting up a PayPal account so I decided I was going to attempt to make my own invitations, thank-yous, cupcake toppers and banner all by myself.

When I created these birthday invitations it first time I'd never used our Adobe Creative Suite to do anything.  It took me a while to figure stuff out, but with a little frustration and trial and error this is what I came up with:

It's nothing spectacular, but for my first try and only the cost of printing ($10 @ Sam's!), it did the job.

The rest of the party stuff was really easy.  Having the fancy schmancy software is nice, but the cupcake toppers, favor tags, food cards and banner, could have all been done with PowerPoint or Publisher since it was just printed from our inkjet printer.


cupcake toppers



Banner



favor tag

I ended up mixing store-bought decorations in with my home-made ones.  I bought plates, napkins and plastic table cloths from good ol' Target.

I didn't get a picture of the plates and napkins at the party, but I snapped a picture of them on my last trip to Target.

Here's the run down of our party paper-ware and decorations:
1.  Package of card stock:  $4.99
2.  Pack of colorful tissue paper for pom-poms:  $4.99
3.  Invitations: 25 5x7's @ $.38 from Sam's:  about $10
4.  Lollipop sticks:  $2.50
5.  Plastic table cloths: 2 @ $3:  $6
6.  Paper plates:  4 packs @ $1.60:  $6.40
7.  Napkins:  2 packs @ $2:  $4

Party supplies and decorations for under $40!

But wait, there's more!  The painting on the gift table was a freebie!  My talented mother-in-law painted this for James, and it's something we'll use for many years to come.....

....aaaaaand here's the super cute cake-on-the-face shot.