immy's 2nd birthday confetti party

My tiny baby girl turned two on Friday. She woke up to streamers dangling from her door which she proceeded to run through, play peek-a-boo in and twirl around in all morning. She tore open her pressies and enjoyed an indoor tea party with some of her toys. And right on cue, no messing around or easing into it, she stepped full on into the terrible twos and threw tantrums and hissyfits and whinged and cried for most of the day. Bless her.

On Sunday, we threw her a birthday party. Immy has a great love for confetti – she has on no less than 8 occasions either discovered my (not-so-well-hidden) confetti boxes or stolen them from me while I’ve been using it and tipped it all over the ground. Then picked up the confetti and thrown it, spread it, eaten it, put it in all cracks and crevices of the house. So she loves it, which made a party theme easy to choose! Here’s what we did.

Invitations

Invites were quite the last-minute affair (as usual). For those who had RSVPed, I whipped up a hand-made note: drew around a bowl onto a piece of paper, wrote a fancy pants Imogen in the centre with a gold pen and the details in black. Little gold dots around the edge of the circle jazzed it up a tiny bit, then I cut it out, rolled it up and popped it into a balloon with some confetti (the tissue paper stuff, not the ones in this picture – you want the light stuff so it floats prettily to the ground!). To get the Imogen the same every time, I traced over the first one on baking paper, then centred it each time onto the cut-out circle, retraced the baking paper again with a pencil so it indented into the white paper, then traced it again with the gold pen for the final result. It worked quite well. For the cousins who lived far away, we mailed the balloon with a note “blow me up and pop me!” and included a warning to the blower-upperer that it contained confetti! Just in case the kids freaked out about balloons being popped, we included a bonus balloon each. I’m nice like that. For those nearby, we blew up the balloon ourselves and hand-delivered it and got to watch them being showered in confetti. So cute.

Decorations

I kept it pretty simple, actually. I had a plan to have a bunch of round decor balls in my colour theme – honeycomb balls, paper lanterns, pom poms, giant round balloons, but then I just went kept it to the confetti wall spots – cut out cardboard. It didn’t take too long to do and the kids had fun helping me stick them up with Blu-Tak. Balloons were hung along the porch and these hideous little hawaii party honeycomb totems (or something) …

were transformed into this two of the totems de-totemed and doubled up with bells in-between. Whatever they are, I think they look better than they were and added a little colour and some jingles when they blew in the breeze!

We also had some balloons on those balloon sticks stabbed in the ground on the front lawn, welcoming guests – some were clear balloons filled with confetti. Clearly I forgot to photograph them (first of many things I forgot to do).

Something else I forgot to do? After buying a whole bunch of beautiful straws in pretty colours and patterns, I totally forgot to put them out and they sat the party out up on top of the cupboard in their jar.

Fun

A pinata, of course. An ice cream cone box turned number 2 covered with a bunch of tissue paper circles. I’m surprised it held up to beatings from the kids – but it did! As usual, I almost didn’t want them to smash it up!

Immy was given these boots by my sister as part of her present. She put them on and didn’t take them off again until I ran the bath. She LOVED them. So cute!

We had party hat decorating (again – going to have to think of something new next time!!) with confetti spots big and tiny, pom poms, glitter letters, paper flowers, sticky pearls and washi tapes. I couldn’t find any plain-coloured hats that weren’t hideous so I made some up out of pastel cardboard and stuck on random strips of double-sided tape.

A while back I was inspired by an art installation called The Obliteration Room. It was a room in a gallery which – along with its contents – was painted pure white. And then it was attacked by sticker-dot-wielding children who were encouraged to stick these colourful dots all over the walls, floor, ceiling, furniture – everywhere! I loved it. So taking this clever idea and shrinking it right down, I set the kids loose with coloured dot stickers on the false wall I put up in my garage.

Though some people felt the need to decorate themselves with those stickers…

And then, for the grand finale, I made some confetti poppers and hung them from the garage roof beams – the kids pulled the strings and the confetti fell over them. In my mind, this looked so pretty and colourful. In reality, they pulled at different times and some looked confused. How DARE these tiny people ruin my plans!!!! You can get proper instructions for something similar from here, but I tried and tested various ideas and found this worked best: I just made up some tubes with cut-up food-packaging boxes (cereal/ice cream cone etc). I stapled them into small tubes, about the size of half a toilet roll. At one end, I punched two holes on either side of it and looped through a piece of string, tying it in the centre. I then wrapped a piece of tissue paper around it, lining up the edge of the paper along the top, over the holes with the string. Tape to inside the tube for extra support. The other end, the tissue paper should be longer than the roll, and you can bunch it up and tie it tight with a piece of string to close the hole at that end. Now fill the tube with confetti by carefully placing it inside the top and hang. Pull the string firmly and it will tear the tissue paper off the end, creating a hole for the confetti to float out of.

Food

Ahh, food. I am HOPELESS with food. I just can’t get it together at parties… I usually try to avoid making the parties at lunch time so I can get away with just putting on rubbish party food, but this fell smack over lunch time so I grabbed a few things for all tastes…. and then forgot to put it all out. Kids got their sausage rolls and party pies and mini quiches and lollies. Everything else? Fridge, cupboard, bags! I made a confetti cake (sprinkles in a vanilla cake) and attempted a Swiss meringue buttercream which was going great guns (even if I did whip it completely by hand – no mixer or electric beaters in our house at the moment!) until I realised the cake was still too warm to ice and it was 1.30am and I had to go to bed, so I threw it in the fridge to ice in the morning. But it just didn’t work – I guess I do need a machine if I want to do that! So I threw the fall-back icing together and sprinkled on some edible confetti. Immy loved it – that’s the main thing. And it looked pretty sitting on my new Emerald & Ella cake stand – second main thing.

It’s her party and she’ll cry if she wants to.

All up, it was a lovely day. Layla is up next and has put in an order for a rainbow and flamingo party. Thanks for that, Layla…

{Images by Belinda Graham for The Happy Home}