Here are a few of the details that we did to make Madeleine’s woodland themed first birthday extra special.

For the monogram wreath:

We started with a green foam wreath shape and an “M” cut from fiberboard. Both from the craft store.

With a glue gun I carefully glued sheet moss pieces to the wreath form. Got these at the craft store too.

After spraying the “M” with Design Master Holiday Red spray paint, we punched dots from self adhesive craft foam with a hole punch and just randomly covered it.

Trust me, Jamie was punching dots for days.

Poke in a couple of wired silk Monarch butterflies and you have a pretty cute wreath,

For the toadstools:

We started with a bag of foam ball halves, again from the craft store.

Then sprayed them, also, with Holiday Red Design Master spray paint.  Design Master is made just for crafts like this…regular spray paint with eat right through the foam. Trust me.

With more hot glue we attached the toadstool tops to the sprayed white dowels.

…and again added foam dots punched from adhesive craft foam.

We made 2 sizes and simply stuck them in all the ferns to keep things looking a little “cartoon-y” and not too serious. It was a kids party after all.

For the gnome hats:

I disassembled a plain party hat from Party City and used it as a template to trace on a sheet of red felt.

After cutting out the felt hat shape, I gave them a good, heavy spritz of spray adhesive. The overspray is pretty messy, and you want to go as close to the edges as possible, so lay down a drop cloth to protect all the surfaces.

I gently rolled an assembled party hat over the red felt piece pushing down firmly as I went.

Then used a pair of scissors to trim the excess felt……or possibly  hat, whichever needed trimming more.

Done, and how charming are these?

Most of the kids would only wear their hats for a few seconds.

At least,

The 3 biggest kids at the party didn’t want to take them off,

(Photo bomb by the birthday girl on tambourine)

Happy Birthday Party, Everyone.