Kelly's Corner: 1st birthday projects

The first birthday is quickly approaching and I thought I would take this weekend to start on a few projects. The plan was slightly thwarted when I had to run all over the place to find some items and ended up getting a few items for one project and a few for the other.

One thing I was able to do as planned was a test run of my DIY Elmo cupcakes and I am so glad I did! I plan on making 3 batches of cupcakes: yellow cake, chocolate cake, and either a fun fetti or red velvet. I plan on making the cake batter from scratch for the big day but for the sake of time I got a box cake since I really just wanted to make sure the icing and decor turned out to my liking.

Turns out that when trying to get the perfect "Elmo" red you have to use a whole lot of red food coloring. I bought the regular McCormick's coloring and it made my otherwise creamy butter cream runny and an icky consistency. After consulting my friends on facebook I learned that there are other options so I plan on trying a few of them. I also want to get/borrow an icing bag and tips to get a better fur effect. For my trial I just used a plastic baggie. I used mini marshmallows for the eyes (cut in half) and used gel icing for the black center. For the nose I used an orange M and M (Thank you Wegmans for selling individual colored M and M's!) and for the mouth I used half of an Oreo (just one side of the chocolate cookie for it to lay flat). Please ignore the runny icing but even though it was yucky I still think they turned out pretty cute.

I wanted to get Lilly's birthday flag banner done this weekend but Micheal's had none of the scrapbook paper I was looking for. I also wanted to get the supplies to make the DIY balloon wreath I saw on Pinterest and had to go to two different craft stores and still wasn't able to get everything. I got the straw wreath, balloons, and there was only one pack of greening pins between Micheal's and JoAnn's so I was only able to start it. I cannot wait to finish it because it already looks awesome already!

So much for getting either of my crafts done. Hopefully I will be able to pick up some more pins this week to finish it! Once Lilly turns 11 months I will be able to do her monthly picture banner. Next weekends agenda will be the flag banner (hopefully) and I am hoping to take her invitation picture. I received the sample from Mixbook in the mail (using a dummy photo) and it's adorable! I designed it and am pretty proud of myself! It's also pretty affordable. I priced out some of the regular invites you get at Party City and it's even cheaper to do it through MixBook and get exactly what I want for the amount of invites I am going to need. Lilly is getting pretty excited!