SMUDGE: birthday

I truely don't know where the last year has gone! It flew by much faster than I could have imagined. Our littlest miss turned ONE last Thursday, and it snuck up on us so fast, that we just threw her a very last minute little celebration with our families on the weekend! But it was kind of lovely that way. It was very different to her big sisters first birthday! For Isla, I started planning and making things for her birthday party a whole 6 months in advance!! For April, we only started planning something roughly a week beforehand! For those of you with more than one child, I think you'll understand me when I say that 'second child syndrome' is a real thing!

None-the-less, it was still a beautiful little afternoon tea with our families, and was a whole lot less stressful than her big sisters party! And I still got to have some fun with baking and DIY. Her cute little white ruffle romper (above) was one of them for example! And it made her look like a sweet little baby bird. I made a few practice ones of these, and I love them all. See below for some more DIY party snaps.

I've never been much of a cook, and honestly cooking kind of scares me! But being a sweet tooth myself, for a long, long time, I've wanted to be an amazing home-baker! After talking to Isla about it and seeing her face light up about baking some cookies together, and all the ideas that she had for them, I decided that we shall become the worlds greatest bakers! Now, that is kind of a big call, and obviously is rather unlikely, but I do want to do more baking and get creative with it. Who knows, maybe one day she will become a baker! So I got onto Pinterest, and looked up a few tutorials and recipes. After buying a few essentials, I got my bake on! And guess what?! I didn't even burn the house down. It was a total success! The Fruit Pizzas below were made from scratch, including the vanilla cream cheese and they were a total hit! They were actually the most popular food item, and all but one of them were eaten. Joe was a big fan, and seemed excited about the prospect of me baking them again!

Talking of baking.. well, wait. Technically I didn't 'bake' her cake! I did however do a cake-hack by stacking 4 pre-made cakes on top of each other, coating in buttercream and then actually managed to cover it in fondant! I needed to watch a tutorial for that, but I honestly couldn't believe how well it turned out!! It stood really well, was so smooth and had no creases. I was shocked, and couldn't stop touching it. Before attempting the fondant, I did prepare myself and picked up a bunch of proper tools for it. The worlds greatest baker needs tools after all, ya know! Joe said that if I was going to buy all the gear, that I would be making all future birthday cakes!! But you know what, it turned out so well that I'm excited about that. I will do a blog post soon with recipe, and fondant tutorial link.

I did actually have a little drama after the fondant was on. I thought the decorating process would be relatively easy, but I was oh-so-wrong. It just didn't work out for me. I had these grand plans for a cake decorated with a drip around the edge, and heaps of yummies piled on top of the cake. That didn't quite work. My original plan was to make a pink smore's cake. But Joe didn't think that would look very pretty. So then I planned to do a Cookies & Cream cake, but that wasn't planned out properly. So I decided to just get the drip on to start with. I went off a recipe, but it was terrible! Once I had combined the white chocolate and the cream, it turned into this horrible mix of what looked like melted cheese!! It was yellowish, oily and separating. I was horrified! I put a drop of pink gel colouring in, but that definitely didn't fix it. It was unusable! After a slight meltdown, Joe came to the rescue and melted the little bit of chocolate we had left. We put a couple drops of pink gel food colouring into it and mixed up a pretty colour. Then Joe tipped it on top of the cake, and I spread it around with my cake palette knife, letting it drip down the sides a little. Then we popped the cake topper into the top of the cake, and the chocolate drip dried quite quickly around it. And that was it. We were out of time to do anything further! But you know what, it was actually perfect. It was so sweet in it's simplicity, and almost looked like a giant smooth marshmallow dipped in pink chocolate. So even after the drama, it was exactly right.

Unfortunately being a small gathering, and having quite healthy family and friends, the cake only had a couple pieces actually eaten! So after the party, I had the best fun 'smashing it'! It was a little sad to waste it, but as it was going to be thrown out anyway, I got some fun out of it. It was incredibly therapeutic! I filmed it, and Joe popped the video in reverse for some fun.

Another DIY mention are the 'A P R I L' letters that we made. I picked up the letters and some pink and white tissue paper from Spotlight. I painted the letters white, and then I cut up the tissue paper into roughly 6cm x 6cm square pieces. Then I scrunched up the tissue paper squares in the centre, creating almost a 3D flower-like shape, and using a hot glue gun, glued them all over the letters. I had no idea how they would turn out, but I really love them. You could use any colours you like for a different effect. We've actually kept the letters and plan to pop them up in Aprils room soon.

Just one more quick DIY mention, and that was the Highchair. We decorated it up a little for her cake smash. Which was actually just her touching a spongecake and trying to give it back to Joe. She had no idea what to do with it! It was Islas idea to pop the bunch of balloons behind the Highchair (clever cookie!). We also got some sweet little white tissue paper tassels from Spotlight and used the hot glue gun to glue the string to the sides of the Highchair. It was a couple metres long, so we folded it over a few times. Then I just cut out the letters 'O N E' and glued them onto the front. Really happy with how this turned out. April kept giggling with how the tassels were touching her toes!

The whole afternoon was lovely. Here's a few more snaps.

I love watching our little April Elle grow. I wish she would slow it down a little! But it brings me so much joy to see her exploring the world and learning new things. Her little laugh is the cutest thing, and her eyes sparkle with happiness. She has so much determination and is very strong willed, and I'm excited to see her personality develop further, and really get to know the little lady that she's becoming.

I can't wait to see the adventures we go on this year, and the new things that April will learn. It's going to be a totally different year to the one we've just had! Especially as Isla will be heading off to her first year of Kindy, so I will have so much more one on one time with April.

I can't believe how fast both our girls are growing up. When you have a baby, you feel like you'll always have a baby, but you don't. It comes and goes so quickly. I'm so glad that our girls have each other. Their bond is strong and beautiful to witness!

That's all for now. Please excuse me while I go and get emotional about our growing girls!!

- A M Y D A V I S

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I can't believe that our little girl is already ONE! I have no idea where the last year has gone. People tell you that it's goes fast, but I had no idea it would be over in the blink of an eye.

Isla is growing into the most beautiful, kind hearted little girl. She has such a sweet heart and her little personality is shining through. I couldn't be more proud of who she is becoming. Every day we watch her learning new things, and her curious eyes watch your every move. Her laugh is infectious, her smile is BEAUTIFUL, and her joy is so obvious. She can't help but bop along to music and squeal while she excitedly runs down the hallway. The way she cuddles us, and all of her toys completely melts me from the inside out.

I didn't know that I could have so much love for such a little person. My heart feels like it's bursting, in the best kind of way.

We threw her a little first birthday party over the weekend, and made it bright, fun and colourful, just like Isla. As you probably know, I've always been a big DIY person, so planning this party was no different! Some ideas I came up with in my sleep, and others I got inspiration from pictures I had seen.

I had planned a confetti themed party, with a pretty little dash of boho thrown in, and it was going to be held out the back of our Nans place. There are these beautiful trees there, and with all the decorations I planned out, it was going to create this special little outdoor space. But in my head, the weather was going to be beautiful also, and unfortunately on the day it of course decided to pour down with rain!! As it always seems to do when you plan an outside event. Typical. SO, come Saturday it was a little stressful changing the whole party location to be undercover. In fact, I didn't even get to use my most favourite DIY project that took me probably a week straight to make, because there was no place to hang it. Ahhh. Such is life. The day still turned out really lovely, and Isla had an absolute ball which is the important thing!

I wish we had gotten more photos, but with the rush of things on the day, it just didn't happen! I've put together a few snaps so you can see some of the things we made.

One of my favourite things I made was the little romper you see on Isla above!! A couple days before her party, I drafted up a pattern from scratch, and cut out my pattern onto plain white fabric. Then I got my fabric ink out and mixed up some colours. Using different sized circular foam brushes (which I later found out are called Dabbers) I stamped on the confetti spots! Once dried, I ironed it to set the ink, and then sewed it together.

It turned out even better than I thought it would! She looked like a giant confetti marshmallow, and I LOVE it! If it didn't take so much time to make to the pretty fabric, I would be selling these in my shop! In fact.. I might just do it anyway!! Because it's so pretty, and life needs pretty things in it.

I picked up some glass vases from local Op Shops, with the idea to make some table decorations! When I got home, I painted them white. It probably took about 3 coats of paint. Then I used my confetti hole punch and coloured card, both from Spotlight, and glued on little confetti spots close to the tops of the vases. I love how they turned out. Then I realised I probably needed something to go in the vase, and I made up Pom Poms, and hot glue gunned them onto kebab sticks that I had also painted white. So pretty!

One of the big projects that took a lot of time was these giant paper mache letters! My Sister-in-Law had previously cut the letters out from foam blocks using a wire cutter. She had them for her engagement party, and said I could have them. She had all the letters I needed except for the 'I'. So I used an 'R' and cut it up to make an 'I'. Honestly, it was very messy and I had foam everywhere in our kitchen because I didn't use a wire cutter! But once I got a coat of paper mache onto it, it was much better. I painted them white, and then stuck more confetti card all over them! This took hours and hours, but I loved the end result! The letters were originally going to stuck in the grass, but due to change of location, they ended up on the food table.

Who doesn't love Oreos covered in white chocolate.. and then covered in Sprinkles?! Thank you Pinterest!!

Also whipped up some fruit kebabs sticks to have for people to make their own fruit sticks. (You know.. a healthier option to the Oreos!)

The day before the party I quickly typed up some 8"x10" prints to have around the place as well. Some of these will be going in her room now.

My favourite DIY project that I mentioned before was a beautiful white backdrop. It took so long to make, and unfortunately didn't get used! HOWEVER, it's now hanging in Isla's room, so I can't complain. It's made from deli paper. We cut up 1000's of little white half circles, and taped them into cones. Then using a pin and fishing wire, stitched them into rows of roughly 30. I really love how it turned out! He's a sneaky preview..

With the help of my Mother-in-Law and Sister-in-Law, we spent a couple nights making 16 giant DIY tissue paper flowers. I bought and painted the sticks white, then made the tissue paper flowers. I later stuck them to the sticks, and they were placed in the garden. There were dark pink, light pink, dark purple, lights purple, white and mint green ones. So pretty! We didn't get a photo of them at the party, but I got one afterwards. As you can see, Isla was a big help with getting a photo!

OH! And one more mention! Because they took so long to make! I bought some packets of little wooden spoons for the Ice Cream bar. I painted the ends white, then stamped on words, then painted on little coloured dots to go with the theme! Cuuuuutee.

I have a few snaps from her actual party, so I'll post them below. Lots of fun things, like an Ice Cream Bar and Macaroons with personalised box covers as favours! But another one of my favourites is the cake that my Mother-in-Law made! It was a confetti cake with actual confetti cake spots throughout it. Again, we got the idea from Pinterest. It turned out great!!

Oh! Another genius idea by my Mother-in-Law was the large blow up pool with little balls that she organised. She also hired play equipment for the kiddies. It was definitely a hit! Isla was making friends and making my heart burst even further!!

Now that the party is over (and the house is finally clean again), I can relax a little and get back into a normal routine. Getting to sleep before midnight is definitely a good thing!!

All in all, the party was a success! We are so lucky to have such amazing family and friends in our lives. Isla was totally blessed and spoilt with love. Thank you to everyone who came to celebrate with us, and to everyone that helped make the day happen!!

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