The Big 1: Khloe's County Fair Birthday Party: The Decorations

My baby is a year old.  Those words don't even feel right coming out of my mouth...or fingers, I guess.  She's talking, walking, making jokes (in her own way)... she says something in baby talk and then laughs out loud at herself.  Everything she does makes me smile. 

Okay, now that I'm nice and weepy.... let's get to the fun stuff.  This party that has consumed all of my waking, non-working moments for the past three months.  I knew I wanted to go with a county fair theme.  I figured at this point, Khloe doesn't know what she likes and what she doesn't like, so at the risk of sounding selfish, this one was for me.   Okay it is selfish.... I know that all of her parties from now on will probably be Mickey Mouse, Sesame Street, Sophia the First..... you get the point.  But this one (since she didn't have a preference) I did the way I wanted.

As I started to edit photos for this post, I realized that I had picked out nearly 100 photos to share.... so I decided to break this into multiple posts.  And maybe cut down on some of the pictures :) 

Here is what the invitations looked like.  Of course, I took out our address.  I don't really want everyone on the internets to know that :)  I made these using GIMP.  I may have mentioned GIMP before, but it is seriously greatness.  It's basically a free version of Photoshop.  Yeah... I said free...

So let's get down to it then.  First off, the decorations.

Theme: Old Fashioned County Fair
Color Scheme: Yellow and Blue

We had the party in our yard.  When you first walked up to the party, you were greeted by a hay bale and with a sign for Khloe's County Fair.  I made the sign by stenciling pallet boards.

We had different tables each different station.  Our tables/stations were:

Cake/ Favors
Gifts
Food- Had an EAT pallet sign
Sweets- Had a SWEETS pallet sign
Lemonade Stand- Had a LEMONADE STAND pallet sign

Here is the cake table. Complete with cake stands that I made.  I'll post a tutorial later on how to make your own.

Lemonade stand table for the drinks.

Sweets table!  This one was my favorite.  It had all of our county fair goodies on it. I wrapped up two shoe boxes in kraft paper to put the stick goodies on.

Khloe had her own little birthday girl area.  Her high chair had pennants that I made from scrapbook paper.  I had my wonderfully tall husband tie two strings in between the trees.  On the top string, he tied the tissue ball I had made.  On the bottom, I made a photo timeline of all of her monthly pictures held up by clothes pins.

 

I put some photos on her gift table to give it a little razzle dazzle :)

 

On the seating tables, I made a runner out of some carnival tickets and made little mason jar/ sunflower centerpieces. 

By the way, I was determined to have blue gingham tablecloths and I couldn't find them anywhere!!  I was getting so frustrated.  Finally I found a roll of blue gingham tablecloths at Oriental Trading.  So, for all of you losing your minds trying to find these, here is a link :) http://www.orientaltrading.com/api/search?Ntt=blue+gingham+tablecloth

I'll be back with another post shortly with more party details!

-Brooke

For part 2 of this post- click here!