Melodi's Second Birthday Party

We hosted Melodi's birthday party yesterday.  My in-laws were able to make it to celebrate with us.  There was a huge influx of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle party ideas on Pinterest and I thought that would make an adorable party.  My Cricut was much less used this go-round than Melodi's party last year, but I still had a bunch of DIY elements.  Most of my ideas came from Pinterest pins to other blogs or etsy, there are even a few original pins made by me during my planning.

If you haven't read, or don't remember, the storyline the jest is a little caterpillar eats through a bunch of fruit during the week, a bunch of junk food on Saturday, a green leaf on Sunday, then enters its cocoon, and finally emerges as a beautiful butterfly.

INVITATIONS

Since we live in such a digital age I did my invitations by e-mail even though there were so many cute invitation options out there.  Publisher has a great e-mail feature that I learned about through my FIL who uses them for Lions Club e-mails when I was picking up a public affairs position in an national alumni organization.  As I was editing the picture I realized that I put 2011 on the invite instead of 2012... oops!

FOOD

We followed the storyline for the food, providing apples, pears, plums (prunes), strawberries, oranges, sausage, and swiss cheese (also cheddar).  I made little signs for the food using white cardstock and sharpies.  I did some searching (and therefor original pins to Pinterest) for DIY card holders and found a binder clip tutorial by www.got2stamp.com (even better, I had enough binder clips in the house already).

CAKE

There were so many ideas I had for the cake, and kept finding new ones on Pinterest or during my random trips for nothing important to JoAnns or Walmart.  I settled on cakepops (cupcakes weren't going to happen because last year was pure craziness trying to make a cupcake out of cupcakes).  The simple recipe to make cakepops is:

1. make a cake
2. crumble it up
3. add a little frosting and mix
4. mold into balls
5. chill overnight
6. dip in chocolate or candy
7. chill
8. serve

I used the Cake Pops recipe by Veronica's Cornucopia.

For the layout I had seen a caterpillar shaped line of cake pops on Cupcake Takes the Cake so we went with that as the starting point.  Mine was much longer and not double layered.

For the base we had a piece of scrap wood in the garage that I covered with wrapping papers for a "cakeboard" to which we taped some desert foam (floral foam that holds water) and connected the foam with toothpicks, then covered with Easter grass to "create a habitat."

DECORATIONS

The only decoration I did not related to the food or cake was a balloon caterpillar tacked to the wall.  We blew up some balloons, tied them to a long strand of fishing line, and tacked it up.  It ended up being short by 2 balloons so we individually tacked the last two up.  If I were to redo this project I would individually tack up each balloon to get a better shape.

PARTY FAVORS

When I decided on the theme for the party I looked up caterpillar party favors and found several barrette ideas, mostly on Etsy.  I chose to do this one but didn't do eyes or antenna.  Obviously you can't give a little boy a barrette, so we got some little wind up caterpillars from Party City (talk about blowing the party favor budget out of proportion).

BIRTHDAY GIRL OUTFIT

I asked my mom to embellish a shirt and make skirt for Melodi to wear for her party and she did a great job.  We found some Eric Carle fabric from an online quilt store to use.  I attached one of the caterpillar barrette party favors to a headband, but it didn't stay on Melodi's head very long.

THANK YOU CARDS

More about these when they're done...  Ok, so they're not done and in the mail, but they are created, four have been written, and the remainder will be written today.  Then it's off to the post office tomorrow!

The green cardstock is 4.25" x 5.5" and the white is 4" x 5.25".  I used a Fiskars pop-up round punch to punch circles to make the caterpillar, a Thank You stamp from my pile (it's actually the one I purchased for my wedding thank you notes), and a green chalk ink pad.  A basic black journaling pen was used for the eyes, antenna, and legs.