Obviously Little is too young to voice any of her own opinions as to her preferred party theme so I chose the theme for her, but I wanted her to be excited on the day and recognise the images, so in the run up to her birthday I read The Hungry Caterpillar book to Little every day. I'm not sure if this made any difference to her! I consulted the book a lot on matters of party menu, decorations, invitations and so on, so Poppet started referring to it as Little's "party book", and still does, although now according to her she is planning a party for Monkey.
For the party menu we served up all of the food that the caterpillar eats in the book -so we had apples, pears, plums, oranges, strawberries, watermelon, pickles, cocktail sausages and so on. We had a platter of different types of 'Swiss' cheese including Gruyere, Jarlsberg and Emmental, and another platter with a selection of salami. And lots of nice breads to eat it all with. It was a great finger-food menu that really suited little ones.
The lollipops were parmesan crisp lollies made by Aunty Jenny, who must have psychically realised that my own lollies (dark chocolate ones) hadn't turned up in the grocery delivery I had organised. The strawberries were chocolate dipped (also by Aunty Jenny). For ice creams, I found some bubble blowers in the shape of ice cream cones which solved the whole how-do-I-serve-ice-cream-without-it-melting-everywhere conundrum.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar food labels were very helpfully and kindly made available for download from this site, I just had to print them out and laminate them and then stick them onto kebab sticks.
The lollipops were parmesan crisp lollies made by Aunty Jenny, who must have psychically realised that my own lollies (dark chocolate ones) hadn't turned up in the grocery delivery I had organised. The strawberries were chocolate dipped (also by Aunty Jenny). For ice creams, I found some bubble blowers in the shape of ice cream cones which solved the whole how-do-I-serve-ice-cream-without-it-melting-everywhere conundrum.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar food labels were very helpfully and kindly made available for download from this site, I just had to print them out and laminate them and then stick them onto kebab sticks.
Our 'cupcakes' were fairy cakes decorated with butter icing and rice paper toppers featuring a cute baby photo of Little! Poppet was initially quite disconcerted about eating her sister's face but soon got used to it. The 'chocolate cake' was expertly crafted by Uncle Mike using swiss rolls and a complex system of dowels and rods (the joiner in him) to create a caterpillar.
Little's birthday cake was a vanilla sponge sandwiched with raspberry jam and buttercream, with fondant icing and sugarcraft decorations (and some smarties around the bottom).
I made the caterpillar cake topper following these instructions, and then the other foods around the cake I made following the tutorials here, here and here. I made the decorations in one afternoon with Poppet; she was using playdough and I had the sugarpaste; she realised that she had the raw deal though and kept asking to "swap mum".
I saw this balloon caterpillar idea on Pinterest and thought it was really simple but effective; Aunty Anna and Grandad cleverly put it together for us. Some party-goers didn't realise that it was a caterpillar, they shall remain nameless!
We decorated the room with some butterfly garlands as well - one paperchain butterfly garland that I have already blogged about making, and the other I made by cutting out butterflies from lots of different sheets of coloured paper and then glueing two together with ribbon in the middle. Better instructions are here.
We also had a paperback copy of the Very Hungry Caterpillar book for people to leave a message in for Little to have as a keepsake from her first birthday. It was a lovely birthday party and it's nice to have it all written out for us to remember the details!
Poppet: 2 yrs 9 mos
Little: 1 YEAR!
What a lovely idea for a party. The girls loved it!
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