Milk & Cookie Birthday Party

My adorable little nephew just turned 1! I can't believe it has been a year already since I made these shirts for my family to meet him in the hospital.

He had a milk and cookie themed party. And I designed the invitations. I used Adobe Illustrator to draw out the design.

 I also helped my sister out while she made dozens and dozens of cookies by making the cookie cake.

I used 3 chocolate circular cakes with a thin layer of icing in between for the base. And for the cookies on the top I carved the cookie shape out of 2 white circular cakes. Since the shaping left all the edges crumbly I had to do 2 layers of icing to cover the cake crumbs that mixed into the icing.

I then stuck real chocolate chips into the cookie on the top. I used larger bakers chocolate chips for decoration around the bottom and top of the base cake.

I think Liam thought my cake was awesome!

I also made a chalkboard poster for a photo prop with all of Liam's first year information. There are a lot of them on Etsy right now that are hand painted with pen markers but I am a little more indecisive, I like to place something try it out, move it around, change the font, see where it looks best.... so I did my poster on the computer.

 I used Adobe Illustrator but you could use any vector based design program. I downloaded my favorite chalk board fonts from www.dafont.com or you could use the links from this site: http://www.lilblueboo.com/2013/01/favorite-free-chalkboard-fonts.html

I took the file to staples and printed a engineer print, only cost $3.46. Then I used spray adhesive to attach the paper to a black foam board then cut off the white border and voila! Done.

My sister had tons of unique, special touches to make this party awesome, these were just my contributions.

~Jessica

Piggie and Gerald Birthday

So if you don't know who Piggie and Gerald are then you must not have an elementary age kid in your house (and if you do and don't know who they are you need to go to the library!!) The Piggie and Elephant Books by Mo Willems are my son's absolute favorite. He has read every book about 30 times each. I hear him in his room at night giggling and I know he is reading about Gerald and Piggie's shenanigans.

So when I am faced with a theme for my 7 year olds' birthday party my first thought was Piggie and Gerald. So I will continue to add to this post as I create more and more for his party in 2 weeks, right now I finished a couple applique tee shirts with his favorite characters. I just did a simple applique- using felt so it won't fray and I didn't have to zig-zag stich making the outline intrusive to the desgin.





I also designed a comic book style invitation for the party.

More to come!!