Ladybug First Birthday Party

Our little girl is turning one tomorrow, but we had her party this weekend!

I started planning for her first birthday a few months ago. I did my best to keep costs down by holding the party at our house and by sending out email invitations. My Mom and I made all of the food ourselves and bought party supplies at the dollar store and Party City. I used Pinterest as a guide to help me figure out how to make a Ladybug cake and I got some other easy ideas from there, as well.

Two months ago, I sent out the invites:

After that, I planned our menu and our decorations. I'm a scrapbooker so I have a lot of tools at my disposal that are already in my craft room. I already owned all of the cutting and gluing tools, as well as most of the paper I needed for her party. I purchased one pack of red paper that I will end up using on some future scrapbooking pages.

I bought 2 red tablecloths from Party City and cut out 1 3/4" black paper dots that I glued onto the tablecloths to make them fit the ladybug theme. This is the only photo of the tablecloth I have as I forgot to take pictures of the food after it was out. It cracks me up since the cake blends right into the tablecloth.

I made a chocolate cake in two 8" cake pans and used a small cake pan I found at Michael's for the ladybug's head. I used red and black frosting color to color white icing. The black dots on the ladybug are from sugar paper that I cut with my 1 3/4" punch. I used twizzlers for the antenna and white writing icing for the face. I am not a cake decorator, obviously, but I am happy with how it came out. 

I baked sugar cookies and used a ladybug shaped cookie cutter to cut out the cookies. The icing is red cookie icing and black writing icing. Next time I would use black cookie icing because the black icing didn't harden which meant it smeared when people put them in the to go bags. These were our party favors.

I used the Cricut to cut out the banner. The banner took me about 2.5 hours to complete. The longest part was waiting for the Cricut to cut out those black circles with the dots in them.

I bought a roll of black and white polka dot ribbon that I used to string up her monthly photos and to put on ball jars I already owned that held forks and Twizzlers (in red and black, of course).

For the smash cake, I used the same pan I made the ladybug head with and baked yellow cake in it twice so I could make her her very own layer cake. The frosting was the same frosting I used on the cake for everyone else. We did not light the candle, which I'm happy about because the minute she saw that candle sticking up, she grabbed it and stuck it in her mouth!

We had hot dogs, hamburgers and sausages on the grill. My Mom made potato salad and coleslaw. We also had chips and dip, goldfish and pretzels for snacking. We set up a table outside with a cooler of beer and lemonade. Inside, we had water, wine and tea.

For the kids, we had a water table and a ball pit set up outside. We had kids aged 8 months to 5 years at our house and every single one of them enjoyed the ball pit. The 18 month old spent most of her time in front of the water table, dumping water down the front of her dress. :)

  

The only thing I think I would change is giving the birthday girl her cake a little earlier. She was tired by the time we put it in front of her and after a few handfuls of cake, she took her hands, full of icing, and rubbed all that icing into her eyes. That ended the fun quickly! Thankfully, my Mom was there to help cut the big cake for the rest of our guests while I cleaned up the party girl.

I borrowed both of the outfits she wore to the her party on Saturday. Since the dress was borrowed, I stripped it off of her as soon as we were done singing happy birthday so she wouldn't smear red frosting all over it.