M turned one on Sunday and his party had the theme of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I made a bunch of decorations, most of which I found online through Google searches or Pinterest. I thought I'd put them all here for people like me who wish they could have found everything in one spot. I'll also link to the original source, if there is one.
My favorite decoration was the giant tissue paper caterpillar we hung over the dessert table. I think it was M's favorite too- he'd point to it while he ate his breakfast every morning as it hung in our kitchen before we moved it to Nonni's house for the party. This was the most intricate of all of the decorations but after making one or two balls you get the hang of it. I started with the head but I'd recommend starting with one of the green ones, because I think they got better as I went. The original tissue paper caterpillar is
here and the instructions for making the balls are
here. I love how fun he is and would totally hang this in my classroom down the road...even though there will probably be fun-sucking fire rules against it.
Another of my favorites were these flower pots for the utensils. We traced quarters for the caterpillar circles then painted them. I almost wrote "Happy Birthday M" on them but I decided against it since I figured I'd end up either using them at school or putting flowers in them. M's Nonni gets the credit for this idea.
We didn't do goody bags but gave the kids who came bubbles instead. These bubbles are from the dollar store (they blow great bubbles too). We took the labels off and made our own.
The next caterpillar was made of construction paper circles and had different photos of M on each circle. The original decoration is
here. We made ours crawl around the doorframe.
These were construction paper circles linked with ribbon. They hung a little funny by themselves so I used double sided tape to keep them straight. I'm thinking if you used a stronger material than construction paper they might hang better.
This sign was for the front of M's high chair...obviously try to position so that antenna doesn't get ripped off, oops.
I found my cake idea
here. It's a sheet cake on the bottom and the caterpillar is a bundt cake cut into pieces. That was the trickiest part. I cut it into thirds but had to do some filling of spaces with frosting. I'm still not sure exactly how you're supposed to cut the bundt cake but I was really happy with how it came out. Dots and eyes are M&Ms. Feet are Hershey kisses cut in half.
M also had a "smash cake" - two 8-inch round cakes cut smaller (maybe 4 inches?). Here are the before and after shots:
And these were our invitations. Made with Photoshop....
