Manny's 1st Birthday Party {Part 1}

For Manny's 1st birthday party, I had planned on doing a vintage sock monkey theme with red and aqua accents. As my planning progressed - particularly as I designed his invitations - it became more of a red and aqua theme with sock monkey accents. I think I was just burned out on the sock monkey stuff after having 2 sock monkey baby showers, and honestly it was just hard to come up with new ideas. So I decided to focus more on the colors, and I love how it turned out!

Since I have so many pictures, I'm going to divide this into two posts.  Let's start with the sweets table! As I mentioned, we had the party on our back veranda and it was SO windy, which made it hard to set up like I wanted. You might notice some differences in the pictures as we had to rearrange every once in awhile to accommodate the wind.

The backdrop curtains were $12 at IKEA, and I made the banner using my Cricut and then used rubber cement to glue the triangles into double fold bias tape. I made my cupcake toppers and wrappers myself, and used some free digital backdrop papers from Sprik Space. She always has great fun, free printables. The sock monkey clipart was purchased from Cupcake Cutiees Designs.


My sister-in-law Tracy led the way in all of the baking, and I am so thankful! Aside from the fact that I'm not exactly a baker, being sick all week left me with not much energy so I was lucky to have her help. She is so talented and I definitely couldn't have done this without her...thanks SO much Tracy!! :)

We had SO many yummy treats. Chocolate covered pretzels, Oreo dipped brownies, sugar cookies, devil's food cupcakes, chocolate covered mini bananas, kettle corn with peanut M&M's, and some other candy. I made some cute label tents for all of the food, but since it was so windy I wasn't able to set them out.

I saw sock monkey cake pops on etsy, but didn't want to pay $4 each for them! After searching around, I came across this tutorial on how to make your own. Let me tell you...these things were not easy and some of them came out a little...well, special looking. To save on time, we used a brownie pop silicone mold from Hobby Lobby. It's much faster than rolling individual cake balls, but as you can see the shape is much different and not exactly round. They were definitely the way to go for this project though. If you make these, I recommend (lots) of patience and an assembly line of people. :)

We also had these little "cake sandwiches". The concept came from this recipe for cupcake poppers, but when we saw a silicone pan at Hobby Lobby that had small squares we decided to use that rather than cut the tops off cupcakes. They were so yummy!

I saw these mustaches on a stick on Jill's blog, and thought they were so fun so we made some of them too. I purchased the molds from Bake it Pretty.

For drinks, we served red and aqua punch and bottled water with custom labels (tutorial found here).

 

I got the fun striped straws from Garnish using a Groupon I purchased...great deal! 

I made these party hat pics of Manny based on this idea here. I ran out of time and wasn't able to turn it into an actual banner so just taped them up individually...I love how they turned out. :)

For favors, I filled little pails with bubbles, bouncy balls, and other fun treats for the kiddos.


We also made this stand to display his monthly pictures - idea and tutorial via I Heart Naptime.

And of course the party wouldn't be complete without Maxx the Monkey, who has been the co-star in all of Manny's monthly photo shoots. :)

So yeah, I wasn't kidding when I said I had a lot of pictures. :) And there are still tons more to come! It really was a perfect day, and was a huge team effort to pull it off. My mom, dad, husband, sisters-in-law Tonya & Tracy, brother-in-law Joe, sister Rachael....seriously you guys are all the best. :) And as I'm typing out this list I could keep going because basically if you were at my house before the party, you were doing something to help. So thanks SO much to you all for pitching in and making this day so wonderful! It was the perfect way to celebrate Manny's first year.

Stay tuned for the rest of the party pics, and maybe even some free party printables! (updated to add: free printables can be found here)