Ok so I promised DIY's.
We celebrated my son's first birthday last weekend and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to share a few of my favorite DIY's that I put together for his party.

I tried my best to add some links to the products I bought so hopefully it will help!

For the guest book I got everyone to sign on a Project Life card, that I had printed online. Didn't pay a cent, other then ink I guess. That way I could throw them into J's Project Life photobook I am making for him!

CHALKBOARDS:

I had wrote everything on little chalkboards. But we all know chalkboards are pricy. I bought one chalkboard which you will see below and I used a 40% off coupon at Michaels. For the rest I bought little pieces of plain wood from Michaels (ranging from .50 cents to $1.25) and I already owned some Martha Stewart Chalkboard Paint. Made my own Chalkboards!

All you need to do is two coats of paint and then take some chalk and draw over the entire thing. Then take a cloth and rub it off. It will give it the chalkboard finish.

CHALKBOARD POTS:

To incorporate more of the chalkboard/garden theme I had bought some small ceramic pots from the dollar store and again just painted them with chalkboard paint. Then bought some small little plants from Walmart for $2.50 a piece. 

BURLAP POTS:

These cute plant pots were from the dollar store again, no more then a dollar each and already owned some burlap. You can buy it from Michaels for pretty cheap if you look around and use a coupon. I hot glued it to the pot and left some extra burlap on the top to fold over into the pot and glued it in the pot as well. I had some cute polka dot ribbon I had got on sale awhile back from Michaels and just hot glued it around the edge of the burlap. I did not actually glue that part to the pot just because I liked the three dimensional look to it. I then took some parchment paper and cut some squares and shoved it in the pot.

CAKE POP HOLDER:

My amazing Mother-In-Law made these adorable cake pops. The little boxes I got from Target for .50 while they were going out of business here in Canada. I then bought some Styrofoam from Michaels and wrapped them like a present in gold paper. They worked wonderfully.

PAPER PENNANTS:

The pennants were all homemade, VERY easy again! Bought a stack of paper from Michaels (it came in a package with brown, beige, grey, yellow beige and black) cost me 5$. Also bought one sheet of gold paper. I just cut out some little triangles by hand (I am not super picky about them all looking the same, if you were picky about them I am sure a paper cutter would work and maybe cutting one and tracing it.) I then used a tiny hold punch and just threaded some string threw. Quick and easy and I made 4 of them in no time!

WOODEN CRATES:

Let's talk about the crates. These were again a bigger splurge for me although I did stain them myself. I looked for the cheapest place to buy crates and sure enough Walmart had them for $10 each. I bought 3 and stained them with a Walnut stain that I bought for the Growth Charts I had made. I kept them outside for a good week since the smell was strong but they turned out really nice in the end. 

MILK CONTAINER FAVORS:

 The favors were probably my longest project. My dear friend Erika was the one who gave me the whole idea of milk and cookies party and all thanks to these little milk carton favors she had a cut out for. Check out her blog: Scraptherapy. She is amazing. She pretty much put these adorable favors together. All I did was assemble them and then I created the little "thank you" tags on photoshop with a graphic I found online. Inside: Cookies and Cream Hersheys drops. I managed to score 4 big bags off amazon for $12.

FLAGGED STRAWS:

The black straws with the gold flag: Straws from Ikea and the flags I just made with gold washi tape, just stick the tape together over the straw and cut a little triangle at the end.

Made the picture on Photoshop and just printed it. Added pinecones as a bit of decor.

Hope you enjoy these DIY's!

Party Planning + DIY's

As many of you already know I have already started to plan my little guys first birthday.
I know, I am crazy. It is beginning of March and the planning is nearly complete. And in all honesty, I started in February, right after I finished planning for this baby shower above.

As I have already shared I love to decorate. I wish someone would pay me to decorate. And even better decorate and take pictures of the decorations!
But for now I will keep dreaming.

Back in February I had come up with the idea of doing a vintage lemonade party, however I lacked a lot of decor and knew it was going to be a bit of an investment to make it work. Luckily a dear friend of mine (who loves to plan parties as much as I do, and her parties will be on my photography blog soon!) came up with the idea of doing a milk and cookies party! BAM! That is what I want to do!

It has been tons of fun scouring pinterest, browsing Michaels for ideas and creating things at home. I am defiantly the type of person who sees something and most of the time says: I am going to make that. I have a hard time spending money especially on decor and feel as if I am being super thrifty if I DIY. But hey if you hate to craft and want to buy it, do it!

One of my all time favorite things to do is sit down in the evening with a good show on, sip tea and creating something!

So on that note I thought since we have so many moms interested in this blog it might be fun to do a few DIY crafts on here. Simple things all of you can do! For instance: a wooden growth chart, tissue paper tassel, paper pennants, chalkboards and maybe a few more.

So that is what I am hoping to share in the next couple posts to come. Always feel free to leave a comment or write us an email if you have any questions as all! Look forward to sharing with you all!

Yours truly
Julie

Parties + Decorating

I cannot believe my baby boy is almost one! It is crazy!

I am in the process of making a slideshow for his party, and I am amazed at how time has gone by so fast! And yes, I will admit, I have started his birthday planning way too early!

I love to throw parties...I love to decorate, bake, and have as many people over as I can. The one thing that always comes with parties, though...is the need for money. Having a husband in Seminary, working one day a week, and me home with the baby makes for not a ton of extra cash floating around. So most of the time when I want to throw a party, I am determined to search around my house to find whatever I can to decorate with.

Most of the time my parties default to whatever I already own, and that's okay. However, with my little guy's first birthday arriving in a couple months...I am realizing more and more that most of what I own is really girly! Trying to turn girly things into something masculine is always interesting. I have turned to the hubby to keep everything in check when it comes to the manly decor I come up with. A few things I have heard over the last week: "Julie, you can't use flowers, or at least not those flowers, way too girly" and "Lace? At a boy's birthday? Not going to work," and last night I got "Could you add some brown?" Okay, I get it--it looks girly! But it is all a work in progress, another reason I started so early!

All this to say, as much as I love to decorate and host parties, I am also often convicted of my need to meet the world's standard of what parties are suppose to look like today. Now days we live in a world of Pinterest perfect parties. I am one who deeply loves to decorate and wish I had endless money to do so. I don't think there is anything wrong with using your creativity, but at the same time there is a fine balance between what is me just decorating and what is me trying to meet a Pinterest standard. It is so easy to look on Pinterest and quickly feel unhappy with the things we have since it feels as if so many others have so much more stuff, talent, resources, money, whatever it may be. This is my battle every time I take it upon myself to throw a party. I start off super excited to use my creativity to come up with something extraordinary, but eventually over time I often (not always) find myself bummed that I don't have as much as she does, can't buy this or that, or just feel I don't have the creativity others have. It is sad to know we live in a world in which the standard is perfection.

So this year, I will tell myself again... what my party looks like does not matter. It does not matter to all the friends who truly care about my son and celebrating him, it does not matter to my husband, it does not matter to my son one bit, and more importantly it does not matter to God. What the world says I should be is not the standard I am meant to meet. Instead, what is going to matter is the people who we get to spend time with and the celebration of my son and the miraculous God who created him. I am excited to have our son's village come around him and celebrate him and his first year on this earth, and whatever the party looks like in the end, well... who cares?! I'm determined to just enjoy the process!