crew's county fair: decorations + food

Finally getting around to blogging Crew's amazing first birthday party. It went so great and I'm so thankful I have these images. I have a few friend's who are photographers and I knew I wanted one of them to be there so I could focus on Crew and the party and not have to worry about getting pictures of everything. I strongly recommend doing that! My good friend Madi of Madi Noelle Photography was able to come since it was an a.m. party and she didn't have a wedding until later that afternoon. Thank you, Madi!

Since I started dreaming up Crew's party way back when I knew I wanted to avoid any kind of character theme for as long as possible! Since his birthday is in October, I thought a perfect theme would be a county fair and so we went with that! It was perfect!

Since I have my own calligraphy and design business, I had big expectations for myself in designing his party invitations. No store-bought invite would do. Here's what I came up with:

I tried to pull in a few county fair elements - the pie, popcorn and goldfish (RIP) made the cut. This was my very first homemade pie crust too!

Of course, the envelopes had to have my touch on them as well!

Now to the party!

Birthday boy faces was inspired by Parents Magazine

This garland actually fooled one of my brothers. He thought it was real! Find a tutorial here

I saw this tutorial on A Beautiful Mess about a week before the party and knew it would be perfect. Luckily I have a handy dad who thought so too. Thanks, Dad! I didn't have time to paint them fun colors, but I'm glad we didn't because the washers left marks and knicks in the wood anyway.

This is Crew's cake. It was made to look like a pie!

I asked a few family members to bake some pies too and they were delish!

 I just used fabric scraps I already had for the rag tie garland

 Party favors were cotton candy and candy apples

We asked all the guests to sign this book for Crew just like we had a book in the hospital when he was born.

Because these photo files are so large, it took me all day to upload just these...so I decided to just break up the party into different categories! Stay tuned!