So what's in those goody bags anyway?

The goody bags are finished and full of treats! I'm really excited about them!

For the girls...

Filled with all kinds of cupcake fun!

These little magnet kits were a last minute addition - just $1 each at Michaels. They didn't fit in the bags, so I unpacked them and put them in little ziplocs instead...


Perfect!


Look at that glittery pencil topper!


The candle and lip gloss are $1 items from Michael's. The cupcake soap is from Etsy shop Sun Basil Garden. Isn't it DARLING? I ordered some soaps for Mother's Day as well and everything looks great and smells wonderful! Check out Sun Basil Garden on Etsy today!

For the boys...


I gave up trying to make the boys' goody bags cupcake themed - cupcakes aren't very manly. So I just bought plain blue bags, added a tag, and filled it with little boy goodies...


(all $1 items from Michaels)

The mazes were four for a dollar at Michaels. Score!

Now I'm off to do some more baking, and to finish the banner! Check back tonight for updates!

Cupcake Party Progress - Three Days To Go!

I hope you're not getting sick of cupcakes... : )

For those of you who are new, or just haven't been paying close attention (ha!) I'm working on all things cupcake for my niece Lily's first birthday party on Saturday!

In case you've missed a post or two... get caught up! (click on each photo for the full post) and if you've been following along, go ahead and scroll down for some new stuff!

CUPCAKES!

Since baking this many cakes and decorating them all would be VERY hard to do all in one day, we baked last weekend, are freezing the cupcakes and decorating them the morning of the party. I was a little nervous about freezing them, but we did a lot of research on best practices and it seems it's all in how you defrost, so I think we'll be just fine!


INVITATIONS!

Heather (Lily's mom) showed me some invites she liked, and I used them as inspiration and gave them my own twist.


I also embellished the envelopes just for fun!


GOODY BAGS!

For the siblings and older girls who are attending the party to take home with them!


PENCIL TOPPERS!

To go inside the aforementioned gift bags! Now all I need is some cute cupcake PENCILS. Anyone seen any lately?


GIFT TAGS! TABLE CONFETTI!

Courtesy of the fabulous Lolly at lollychops.com who is having a CUPCAKE WEEK! I printed Lolly's FREE template (I told you she was fabulous! I mean, not JUST because of the free printables - there's so much more - but you know what I'm saying! Yeah Lolly!) for gift tags - unfortunately I didn't have a scallop punch, so do you know what crazy Aunt Joanne did? Oh yeah, you know it, I cut twelve of them out by hand! Talk about scissor skills - I must have absolutely aced that day in kindergarten...


I'm saving these for Lily's gifts (note to self - don't forget to wrap gifts!)


And then I added one to each of the girls' goody bags. Such a nice touch!




Another of Lolly's templates was for 1-inch punches - I have one of those! Lolly did some sweet things with shrinky dinks, which I'm dying to try, but didn't have on hand, so I just printed to cardstock to create some colorful table confetti!


FUN! Head over to Lolly's to grab some of her printables and check out Cupcake Week. It's been a blast so far!

And here's a little sneak peak of the project I *hope* to post tonight... I'm so excited about it! I've used some Lolly goodness once again...



Can you guess what it's going to be?? Can you?!


The birthday banner of course! Look out for it later tonight! And lastly (this is a long post!) a big special HOWDY, HI, HELLO! to any of you who have popped over from Lolly's today (thanks for the shout out, Lolly!) please leave a comment and say hello, and do stop back by again!

Cupcake Goody Bags

You know I have a bit of a thing for jazzing up tote bags, right? Well when I was brainstorming ideas for goody bags for Lily's party it seemed only natural that I work with tote bags - that way they can keep the bag and re-use as a purse, etc. after the party.

So I purchased a five-pack of mini tote bags from Michael's for about $5.00. They looked like this...

I removed the handles, and added some cupcake ribbon I scored for a dollar a roll at Michael's. I would have preferred thicker ribbon, say 1 and a 1/2 inch, but when it's a dollar - you can't be choosy guys! I hand sewed the heart buttons on to hold the new ribbon handles in place.

You'll recognize the glitter iron-on transfers from yesterday's pencil topper project. They did NOT adhere well to canvas. Sooo... more hand sewing for Joanne! (it's good practice, right?!) If you look close you can see my little stitches. I just sewed around the shapes for reinforcement.

Voila! Cuteness! You'll see these again later in the week when they're stuffed to the brim with take-home goodies for the girls! Now I need to brainstorm goody bags for the boys - tricky with a cupcake theme - it's not exactly masculine!! Stay tuned!

Tutorial: Cupcake Pencil Toppers

Remember when I said I wasn't going to post much about cupcake projects this week, and just do a wrap-up after the party? Remember that? Yeah, well I lied : ) I'm just too, too focused on all things cupcake, excited about the birthday party on Saturday, AND inspired by Lollychops' and Fuji Mama's CUPCAKE WEEK this week (check it out, check it out!) - I can't NOT throw a few cupcake posts your way right now.

So I've had THIS tutorial from Whimsy Love in the back of my mind for a long time, meaning to do something with it. I had picked up some iron-on glitter cupcake transfers over the weekend for another project (coming soon!) but when I had some leftover I just had to play around with them, and ended up with these...

Cupcake Pencil Toppers!

I ironed the transfers onto felt - which I did not think would work at all. Turns out they adhered better to felt than they did to canvas, which I'm using for my aforementioned other project.

I cut them out, two per pencil...

And hand sewed them together...

I left the bottom open to slide on to the pencil. The first one I did, I used six strands of embroidery floss because I wanted the stitching to be visible, and part of the finished topper - rather than be invisible. However, six strands was hard to work with. I went down to just two strands and you could still see the stitches, and it was a lot better and neater.

I need to find some cute blue and pink pencils for my toppers, and then these will be slipped into the big girls' goody bags for Saturday's party!

Cupcake Party Sneak Peak

As you know by now, I'm working on a lot of crafty goodness for my niece Lily's first birthday party. I vowed not to post too much about it on here, because I want it to be as much of a surprise as possible for the guests - and I know that some of them read this blog.

However... I think it's pretty obvious what dessert at a cupcake party would be... and I'm so excited about Heather, Mariah and I's baking adventures today that I just had to share a little sneak peak of this...

and this...

and finally this... because Lily is just adorable...

We used a basic cupcake recipe and Superkid cupcake recipe from one of my favorite blogs, Saucy's Sprinkles. Go check her out - Saucy's a sweet and sassy gal and her blog is a lot of fun to read.

I'll do a full reveal of the finished product and all other things cupcake next weekend. In the meantime, if you haven't already, head over to Dabbled.org to see my pinata project that is featured there today... and stay tuned for new projects here starting Monday!