16 months: DIY bear beanie

I crocheted this bear beanie for you one weekend. You looked sooo cute. I took these photos in the backyard while I was putting up the laundry. You tried to help me with the pegs, as you can see :)

Planning your Up-inspired birthday party

I had a lot of fun planning your first birthday. The inspiration came from a photo I took of you when you were about 5 months old wearing an orange cap and khaki overalls. Your Aunty Katrina remarked how much you looked like Russell from the movie, Up. I loved that movie and the idea stuck. So a few months before your first birthday, I went online looking for inspiration and found lots of posts on how to make the Russell costume and ideas from other parties with the same theme.

So I pinned things on to my pinterest birthday board when I had some time and slowly bought small party items on ebay and craft items from spotlight leading up to your birthday. That made birthday planning less overwhelming.

I wanted to take a photo of you in a makeshift hot air balloon, so for weeks I kept my eye out for a basket that was big enough for you to fit in. I drove past our local Vinny's store and saw the big basket we ended up using for your photo shoot. It was only $3! Score! The following weekend, I told Daddy I wanted to get some helium balloons from the local party store to tie to the basket. I didn't realise how expensive big helium balloons were, it was $30 for 1 big balloon, so we decided to buy a colourful selection of normal-sized helium balloons instead for only $16.50. I made bunting from scrapbook paper and hung it around the basket for a more vintage look. Then we went out into our backyard and I snapped away. You were very obliging though it took some coaxing and lots of funny faces to get you to smile.

There ended up being so many good photos of you to choose from to make the birthday invite. I loved how the photos turned out!

For your costume, I stumbled on to this site that had pretty good instructions on using t-shirt transfer paper and furniture pads to make the badges on your boy scout sash. It worked so well that the badges have stayed on even after going through the washing machine! I bought some ribbing from spotlight to make your bandana, that worked well because I didn't need to hem the fabric.

It took me a while to decide on party favours. I wanted to get things that were somewhat useful so taking the character Carl as an inspiration, I got all the boys bow-ties and all the girls bow hairpins. I also spent time decorating the gift bags. I used a border punch cutter to get the decorative border. Then used twine to thread through the holes made by the border punch.

I found some cute paper clips with different characters on ebay which I used to pin the gift bags down. I designed the stickers on vistaprint to put a personalised message on each bag.