Lily's First Birthday Polka Dot Party

Sunday night we celebrated little Lily's first birthday at the Red Tree Gallery here in the Oakley neighborhood. The gallery has beautiful art all over, plenty of space, coffee service available to the party, and it even had a pretty cozy, home-y feel. It was the perfect place to throw a party, especially for a girl as hip as Lily!

Again, we have beautiful party pictures by her father Nathan, of Fyrefly Photography. Nathan and Edie are our best friends in the world and we were so glad to help them throw this polka-dotted bash! (I think Nathan called it a "Polkapalooza")

Roll the party credits:

• The first couple pictures show ideas I got from the lovely City Cradle Design. That pink cupcake tower was inspired by their donut hole tree. I couldn't find white powdered donut holes at the store, so I just got some Hostess mini strawberry cakes, which worked out perfectly to match the pink in the party. I ran out at the top of the tower, so Nick had the brilliant idea to use strawberries we just happened to have in the fridge! It really looked pretty classy :)
• The painted wine bottle idea was inspired by this. But I just painted Lily's name on with regular acrylic paint. If I wanted to reuse these bottles, I could paint over the letters with chalkboard paint. 
• I made the cupcake toppers by altering these on Photoshop.
• The little fabric flowers are made from MADE's no-sew tutorial. I just put them in recycled jars with fabric mod-podged on. It was the same polka dot fabrics I used to sew the table runners.
• The cupcakes and other treats were on a pretty long table right against the front store window, so I knew I had to do something high-impact there. I cut out about a zillion pink, red, and turquoise circles from felt and made them into hanging garland by just sewing thru them one right after the next. I think there ended up being 9 or 10 long strands hanging down behind that table in the window, which looked really cool. 
• My tip for making birthday banners: Print the letters out with good-looking font in the color of your choice and then back them on colored cardstock. Cut little slits on either side of the cardstock, towards the top. Then just thread each one on some ribbon. This way, you haven't sewed or glued the ribbon and you can reuse it for something else.
• Also, I can't take credit for the book-signing idea, my friend Lindsay did that for her daughter's birthday. Thanks Lindsay :)