Thank you to Angie from myfourmonkeys.com for this guest post.

This past August, our family had a blast planning our youngest son Luke’s first birthday party. Usually we don’t have a big hoopla on our children’s first birthday. We don’t live remotely close to any of our family (closest relative lives 11 hours away!), and it didn’t seem like the kids really cared much anyway at that age, right? This time though, with it being our last “first birthday”, I had to do something. The easiest way to get together with all our friends this time of year was to have it,  on a Sunday afternoon. We decided to have it at our church. This was good and bad.

The good: More room! More convenient!

The bad: Very little time to decorate!

So, we made a few decisions. In order to keep cost down, we kept the guest list under thirty (including us). We all know that the little details are what make a party’s decor fabulous. So we decided to keep it simple, creative, and easy on the pocketbook. We pretty much kept this rule. Here’s four easy ideas to make your party special and memorable but not too expensive.

1. Forget an expensive cake and make cupcakes – Felicia, one of my blogger buddies over at Go Graham Go, is extremely creative and handy with a computer. So I forwarded her a copy of the invites we had ordered from Tiny Prints (which by the way were fantastic!), and she came up with this really great cupcake topper. I just printed them out on white cardstock, cut them and taped a toothpick to the backside to make to-die-for cupcakes! Two things I learned doing this. First, if possible use flat toothpicks because they look and work better. Second, if you have time, and your fingers are not killing you from using kiddie scissors, cut out a second cupcake topper or just a solid color coordinating circle to glue on the back (sandwiching the toothpick in between the two circles). This hides the toothpick and makes for a more professional look.
2. Make a handmade art piece – I took a piece of cardboard and painted this piece to set on the food table. No, it’s not professional looking, but it does match the colors and the theme. It also looked pretty cute if I say so myself!
3. Stick to easy, age relevant and cheap party favors – Now, we mostly did this. I had the idea to design our own labels to stick on the backs of mint tins since our party was mostly adult guests. This was easy, and age relevant, but not as cheap as I had hoped for. The small mint tins were almost as much as the larger ones, so we ended up getting a few less but in the bigger size. These ended up costing us $1.50 a piece, which was more than I had wanted to spend, but they came out good. I designed the label using my paint program, the cupcake topper that Felicia designed, matching the colors from our color scheme and adding a personal thank you to our guest. I printed them out on sticky mailing labels and… Ta-Dah! Two things I learned: First, for the bigger size mint tins I think that a plain white sticky name tag might just be the perfect size and make for a better label than the mailing labels I used. Second, next time I should plan ahead and maybe order favor boxes like these I found at Her Wedding Favors and fill them with my own candies for a better deal.
4. Make your own centerpieces – I made my own centerpieces using styrofoam, photos of Luke from the last year, curling ribbon, napkins and paperclips. First, I wrapped styrofoam squares like presents with extra napkins from our party decor. Second, I bent a small paperclip in a “u” shape. Then I cut eight pieces of curling ribbon and tied them to the paperclip. Next I curled the ribbon with my scissors and stuck it in the top of the styrofoam square so it looked like a gift. Then I bent two more small paperclips like this. Next, I stuck several photos back to back with double stick tape and slid them onto the paperclips. You have to be careful when you are doing this or the end of the paperclip will scratch the photo. Then you stick the photos in the box like so. I made several square ones and a few circular ones to use down the center of our tables. These really helped spice up the decor and also were fun to look at. All our guests were commenting on the great pictures and how much Luke had changed over the last year.

Over all I had a great time making these personal creations for the party, and they really added that touch of love to the festivities!