July 8th - party animals (1).JPG — wild animal themed party

Our daughter, Lennie, turned one in July. Since she’s still young, we decided to keep her party pretty simple. We chose a wild animal theme and decorated our porch for the “party,” but aside from cookie decorating, most of this party was spent eating!

One of our main decorations were the little animal figurines with DIY birthday hats. I used some solid colored paper that I already had, but I also wanted to add some patterns into the mix, so I purchased that paper. You can find the template for the mini hats here (Animal party hat template), and while this template worked on some of the animals, it did have to be trimmed to fit on certain animals that were smaller, had ears in the way, horns, etc… Once the template was traced onto the paper and cut out, I rolled the hat into a cone shape and hot glued the two edges together. This was pretty challenging since the hats were so small, and the burns on my fingers by the end were no joke!

We also made a fabric scrap banner for the front of Lennie’s highchair. Some of the scraps were cut/ripped from old shirts, but since we didn’t have many of the colors and patterns that we wanted, small amounts of fabric were also purchased from a fabric store. The banner was VERY easy to make. We started with a piece of twine, wrapping it around the high chair to measure and to make sure it was long enough to be wrapped around and to tie it in the back, and then we laid it down on a table. The fabric was then cut into strips (you can do any size…just make sure they are all relatively equal…ours were about 2 feet long x 1-1.5 inches wide. After cutting the fabric into strips, we simply tied each strip around the twine, making sure to vary colors and patterns.