Tea Party 1st Birthday - On A Budget

This weekend we celebrated my little girl's 1st birthday with a homemade tea party.  I'd seen some amazing parties on other blogs, but wanted to come up with my own style, make the stuff myself AND still pull together the whole thing for under $75.  Yes, welcome to Crazyville, population: me.

I am still sane enough to state what I hope is obvious: this took time to put together.  Usually when you see a jawdroppingly gorgeous party they leave out the part they were up until 3am for a week making it and that it still cost a bunch.  I've got 3 kids at home and limited time & money, but by starting to gather supplies and make the crafty bits little by little in advance (when I had 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there, etc.), I was able to do all this stuff at a reasonable pace.  It made the actual day a lot less stressful and I got to bed before midnight.   So enough boring talk, let's roll out the party!!

To start, I made these teapot invites using my Cricut & Sure Cuts A Lot software several weeks ago.  You can read more about them here.

Here's a little tour of the actual party:

I used yardage of cotton fabrics for the table & cart coverings (bought on sale for under $2.50/yd), so they could be reused or made into sewing projects later.  The pink flowers were silk ones I use to decorate in the house in the spring.  All the trays, glassware, china plates & teapots were things I already had, but went together easily.

I made a gift bag with some of my favorite print papers & spare ribbon:

Birthday banner made with my Cricut, SCAL & some ribbon:

To hold the banner, we used conduit pipe wrapped in crepe paper (credit to my husband for that idea) and topped with these little doodads:

I made little tea sandwiches and used my Cricut to cut out little teapot signs for the refreshments to tie them to the theme.

Since it's a tea party, even though it was 90 degrees, we had to have tea!

And several kinds of treats.  Like this cookie cone (made with the tutorial from Prudent Baby):

Cupcakes with matching wrappers (using the Cricut & SCAL):

And of course a cake made with my personal favorite, modeling chocolate:

How did she like her first taste of cake? Let's see how she started (wearing her last minute added DIY teapot party hat, of course):

And this is where she ended up:

And her "What?!  Haven't you ever seen anyone enjoying their cake before?!"

And the birthday girl had to have a tea dress, so I'd made this for her to wear (which had to be changed moments after the cake photos:

In addition to getting some wonderful gifts (including several gorgeous handmade ones from my crafty aunt), she finally saw the quilt I made for her in this post:

We even got a somewhat decent picture of us together (where Mommy doesn't look quite as exhausted as she feels):

Would I want to do this for every birthday?  Ummmm, no.  But for a memorable first birthday, for my last baby, it was definitely worth it!

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