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How to Make a Paper Bunting

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What’s bunting you ask? Well, it looks like this:

Most buntings, or pennant banners, I’ve seen use fabric. While I like that look, I don’t own a sewing machine and sadly can’t sew a thing. But I do have lots of scrapbook paper so I thought I’d make a paper one instead.

Supplies (exact supplies I used in parenthesis):

1. Cut your paper.

With your paper trimmer, or a pair of handy scissors, cut your paper in half into 6 x 12 strips. Once you’re done cutting your paper into strips, fold each one in half to form a 6 x 6 square. You can use a bone folder to get a nice crease.

2. Cut squares into triangles.

With the fold at the top, make a small pencil mark at the bottom center of the square. Then, cut each side from a top folded corner to the pencil mark.

You’ll end up with a nice triangle. If you want, you can use a paper scraper or even your fingernail and scrape or “distress” the sides a bit.

3. Paint & glitter the letters.

Paint your chipboard letters. Easy enough.

Once the paint dries, squeeze some glitter glue onto the letters and brush it over the letters. Let try.

4. Assemble the bunting.

Using glue dots (or double-sided tape), attach the letters to each triangle. I left one blank for the space between Happy and Birthday.

Unroll your ribbon and grab a triangle. Leaving about a foot of ribbon to hang up the banner, open the triangle and place a one-inch piece of double-sided tape under the crease.

Lay the ribbon on top of the tape and then place another strip of tape over the ribbon. Fold the triangle over the ribbon and put a small piece of tape at the bottom to keep the triangle together. Keep moving down the line until you finish your bunting!

5. Hang it up!

We put two small nails above our door frame and tied the ends to the nails. Worked perfectly!

If you like this tutorial, don’t forget to stumble, tweet or like it!

A Tale of Two Birthday Parties

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{wheewwwwwwwwwww}

That’s me exhaling. I did it. I planned and executed two birthday parties BACK-TO-BACK. We had no screaming babies and no tantrumy children. It was magical for the most part. I couldn’t believe it.

Seven spending-the-night guests. Over 25 people attending the parties. Wanna see what a day of two birthday parties looks like? Here are the highlights:

Little Roo’s Decorations

Remember all that craftiness I got myself into? Well, I’m SO happy with how it all turned out. I ended up putting most of it up the night before, which was a wise choice. My pendant banner (called a bunting I learned) is my absolute fave. That and the fortune cookies, which I filled with such wise fortunes as “There’s a poopy diaper in your future.” and “Good luck is the result of good crying fits.”

When Babies Attack

Apparently Little Roo wasn’t interested in a cute posed picture with the ‘rents.

Smashing the Cake

By far the best part of a baby’s first birthday party is smashing up a cake. We got a cake to match the invitation and a mini smash cake to match!

Both were from Tartlette Treats here in Raleigh and they were super tasty. We got lots of compliments on the cakes.
While the baby cake was cute as could be, the fondant wasn’t soft enough for little hands so we tore it off and let him tear into the inside. And by tear, I mean smash-grab-devour-rub-his-belly-with it.

And if that weren’t messy enough, Little Roo went wild and crazy and dropped the cake on the floor.

We finished up the cake just in time for Big Roo’s friends to arrive. I refilled the food trays while my sisters changed out a couple of decorations but for the most part we had two separate rooms decorated. I decided it would be SO much easier that way. Thank goodness I knocked some sense into myself.

Big Roo’s Decorations

I didn’t do as much for Big Roo because, well, it’s not his first birthday. I forgot to get pics of the little circles for the windows but you can get the point from these.

Long Live the Bounce House

Ah the bounce house. A friend gave this to us years ago and we break it out every so often. Unfortunately, it was DIR-TEE when I unpacked it so I spent, oh, two long hours on Friday scrubbing this thing down. I wasn’t about to come up with a way to keep 10+ four year olds entertained without it.

It was a huge hit but so was chasing around my 10 year old nephew. Go figure!

Oh and the best part about the bounce house? STATIC CRAZY HAIR!

Big Roo’s Cake

So a four year old isn’t nearly as messy as a one year old, but it’s still cute to watch.

After all the friends left, we spent some time opening up mounds of gifts. It was just too much to try and do it with all those people there.

And finally, a shot of the fam. This was actually taken BEFORE the cake, the presents, the friends and all the madness that made up the day. I’m SO exhausted you guys but it was so worth it to see two little happy faces.

Just Call Me the Crazy Crafty Mom Who Spends Too Much Time on Birthdays

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Kids’ birthdays are a big deal on my side of the family. I’m not sure why we get so into them but we do. Our spread-out families typically travel for a party and we decorate to a T.

This year is extra special for the Roo household. Little Roo turns one (ZOMG!) and Big Roo turns a very big four. If you remember, my kids have the SAME BIRTHDAY three years apart so February 23 is one very important day around here.

Being that I’m a sucker for first birthdays, I wanted Little Roo to have his own birthday party. Will he remember it? Only in pictures. And he probably won’t give a crap. But it’s important to me to throw him a bash as crafty as I did for Big Roo… at least for this year.

And how left out would Big Roo feel if I did a party for Little Roo and not for him? Probably like turd. So what’s a mama to do?

Throw them ONE party and call it a day?

That’s a great idea… but that’s not how the crafty side of me rolls. Birthdays are not only a time to get all gushy about the kids growing up, it’s also a time for me to pretend like I’m Martha Stewart and get my craft on.

There I said it.

Birthdays are for me too.

There’s something about playing with paper, glue and scissors that just makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

SO, I’m throwing TWO differently themed parties ON THE SAME DAY.

BACK TO BACK, people.

Yes, I-AM-NUTS.

Each party is 1.5 hours long because everyone who will be at Little Roo’s party will stay for Big Roo’s. Then some of Big Roo’s friends from school will just show up for his party. I have family who will switch out some decorations and plates but some of the stuff will be the same (I think I’ll decorate one room for Big Roo and one for Little Roo).

On top of all this, I’m doing this on a relatively tight budget. I’ll splurge a little on the baby’s cake but for the most part, I’m making 90% of the decorations myself.

Like so. I designed their invitations and printed them at home:

And I also have a crafty mess of supplies- some new, some old- ready for me to go all Martha on them.

Crafty? Absolutely. Crazy? Um, yes. Stupid? I sure hope not. Who cares as long as I’m having craftastic fun with it?

Some people bake for those they love. I craft.

For the record… I WILL NEVER REPEAT THIS DUAL PARTY FEAT.

So that only makes me half crazy, right?

Easy Homemade Ornaments for Kids

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easy-kid-ornaments
Running out of time but need a crafty gift the grandparents will go ga-ga for? Let your kids unleash their creative spark with these fun and easy handmade ornaments!

After asking for ornament ideas from Twitter and Facebook, I decided I wanted to do clay ornaments and use cookie cutters to make holiday shapes. I got clay overload while staring at the clay section at Michaels. I had no clue what to use… until I eyed something called Pluffy. The package said it was non-toxic and for kids. Best thing was that it never dries out YET you can bake it to make something permanent. Score!

At first I was worried about how little there was per package (I only bought two packs). But we whipped out our trusty rolling pin and got to work…

1. Roll out the Pluffy to about twice the size (about 1/4 inch thick).

rolling out pluffy2. Use cookie cutters to cut shapes. Once we cut as much as we could, we balled it up and rolled it out again. With two packages of Pluffy, we ended up with 14 ornaments (a mix of big and little ones).

3. Bake for about 15 minutes (exact directions are on the package). We used a lollipop stick to poke holes for the ribbons.

baking pluffy4. Paint ornaments. We laid freezer paper down to protect the table from one enthusiastic painter.

painting pluffy ornaments5. Decorate! We used Diamond Dust and Stickles. Diamond Dust is like chunky glitter. It’s actually ground glass but is complete safe to work with as long as your kid doesn’t want to eat it! To adhere Diamond Dust to the ornaments, just use clear glue (we used Diamond Glaze) and then sprinkle the dust on top and tap off the excess. Stickles are little bottles of glitter glue that are super easy for the kids to use. We squeezed out dots, stripes and giant blobs of glitter. Big Roo enjoyed putting glitter dots on the Christmas trees in all sorts of colors.

ornament painting with stickles6. Let dry. Blobs of Stickles need about 8 hours to fully dry. You can see the infamous blue Stickle blob in step 7 (hint- it’s above the green dove). Here you can see a candy cane coated in Diamond Dust and two others decorated with Stickles.

7.Tie ribbons at the top of each ornament for hanging. I used leftover ribbon from a few Christmases ago.

pluffy ornaments for kids

Ta-da! Big Roo talked about making these for like a week afterwards. We may have just started another holiday tradition in our house. Do you have a favorite holiday craft?