Collette's Birthday Party! (Part One)

Collette is ONE! We had the best day yesterday celebrating our precious girl's first year of life! I am planning on doing a few posts about her birthday, so I don't miss anything important. :o) I will post all about what Collette is doing at 12 months, and her official 12 month pictures, later. And I also have some videos that MUST be shared, but for tonite I will focus on the party and decorations.

I decided to do "Llama, Llama, Red Pajama" as the theme for her party. We love the "Llama Llama" books and LL nicknamed Collette "the Llama" a long time ago, so we decided it was appropriate for her party. I actually decided on the theme a long time ago, so I was able to buy some red party accessories after the 4th of July when it was all on clearance. That definitely helped with the budget!

Here is Collette's invitation:


I found these cute 1st Birthday plates at Target:


We set up a buffet style lunch in on the kitchen island, and kept the menu simple with Lasagna and Garlic bread. By the time we actually got the food out, I was visiting with people and doing 100 different things and didn't get an pictures of the actual food. :o)


We had a variety of red beverages like Red Cream Soda, Cranberry Sierra Mist, Jolly Ranchers Cherry Soda, and fruit punch, in this fun tub (again.... by the time I thought to get a picture of it, a lot of it was gone):


The dining room. I bought a bunch of party balloons to decorate, and tied them to little red buckets. The little nieces and nephews each got to take one home with them.

We got a fun balloon for Collette's high chair, too. Here she is showing off her "one" finger:



We can only seat about 8-10 at our dining room table, so we had an "overflow" table set up in our study (which is adjacent to our dining room) and Collette's little table for some of the kiddos.


We did red candies in some of the little buckets on the table, and each table got a tray of Llama cookies that we glazed and sprinkled with red sugar:


We also made a little topiary with red cherry candy slices:



I had Collette's newborn through 11 month photos on display (I actually made the photoholder a few weeks before in MOPS):

A close-up:


and I had 2 scrapbooks and 2 digital photobooks of her first year on the buffet for people to look through:


And of course, we had the Llama LLama Red Pajama cake! Let me tell you, I could find NOTHING on the internet about making a Llama cake. Apparently, Llamas aren't a very popularbirthday party theme. :o) I ended up finding directions on how to make a giraffe cake, and just altered it to be a Llama(I actually made a "test llama" two weeks earlier, just to make sure I could do it,and brought it into LL's work.Luckily, Baby Llama is just an illustrated character, so I didn't need to make a realistic looking llama.


I also made Collette her own "Smash Cake" to enjoy.


I found Collette this cute red party outfit and appliqued her little cupcake and "1" on it for her party:


Collette had tons of fun opening her gifts and and eating her cake, but this post is already long so I will save that for tomorrow. For now, I will leave you with my favorite shot of the birthday girl:

CHOCOLATE CAKE IS AWESOME!!!!!