Time for Tea and Sweets

My beautiful daughter is turning one this week and we had a birthday bash for her over the weekend. One of her favorite toys is her little singing teapot, so we decided to have a tea and sweets party. And of course I'm in love with the turquoise and pink combination so I couldn't resist splashing the house with color.

Thanks to my good friend Pinterest, I had lots of ideas for baking and decorating for the party. It could be said that I went a little overboard, but how many times does your precious baby girl turn one year old? (I'll try to add links for all the projects and recipes soon!)

First, the food. We started off with a massive sweets table, including cake, cake pops, homemade peppermint patties, rocky road fudge, raspberry almond jammies, peppermint-chocolate marshmallows, caramel brownie cheesecake, snickerdoodle mix and sugar cookies.  Oh yeah, and tea, coffee and punch.

I also put together these great candy machines using a flower pot and a glass bowl. They were really cute and so cheap and easy to make! I filled one with chocolate and placed it on a table for a centerpiece and filled the other with gummy cherry slices and placed it on the sweets table. For the tablecloths, I took advantage of some great after-Thanksgiving sales at JoAnn's to get some pink and blue felt. We cut a simple scallop pattern to make an easy runner. I think we covered all the tables for less than $10 and they looked so much better than those cheap plastic tablecloths.

For the favors, I filled baby food tubs with chocolate pieces and added a ribbon and a tag. For the kids, I put together some treat bags with animal crackers.

I made some tissue paper pom poms for above the treat table and photo backdrop and also made an adorable garland banner using scrapbook paper and some photos of my daughter. We made a tutu for her high chair using tulle strips found on clearance at hobby lobby. We knotted tulle slips onto pieces of elastic and affixed them to the high chair using binder clips.

Not so simple and easy were the ribbon topiaries. Well maybe they were easy, but they definitely were not quick. You take a styrofoam ball, loop a bunch of ribbon into little circles and use straight pins to stick them in place. Then stick a dowel in one end and stick it in a styrofoam block in a box, or bag on the bottom. They took much longer than expected and my poor thumbs were so sore from sticking in hundreds of pins.

Side note - at Hobby Lobby, in the ribbon aisle by the fabric, look on the bottom shelf. You can buy a bag of 15 ribbon remnants - 2 yds long each - for $1.99!  I really like how these turned out and they were a nice centerpiece for the extra tables.

Finally, we really like documenting milestones in our daughter's life, so we put up a photo backdrop (using the same felt as the tablecloth and the same tissue poms as above the table) and asked our friends to take pictures with the birthday girl so she could celebrate the day for years to come. We also laid out some of the photo books from the past year so people could flip through and see how much she's grown. And, we put out a matted photo frame where people could write their birthday wishes. (Thank you Auntie Janet!)

 

We had a wonderful day and it was so fun to see all of our family and friends come together to celebrate! (And a special thanks to Holly and Lily Bella Photography for all the great photos!)