The Very Hungry Caterpillar Birthday Party Invitations

Name blacked out to protect Little's anonymity!

Little has just turned one so we are planning a small birthday party for her. The theme is The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Poppet and I recently spent an afternoon making the invitations. I had looked on Pinterest for some inspiration and some of the offerings were seriously impressive! Ours, not so much, but they were easy and quick to make so I think I get bonus points.

So this is what we did:

I traced the leaf from the back page of the book and made a template from it - I then used this to cut out as many leaves as I needed from some green card (and some construction paper when I ran out of card).

We used a hole punch (it was a double punch but we angled it so it only did one hole at a time) to punch out a few holes along an edge of each leaf. Poppet's favourite activity ever.  I positioned the leaf, she pressed down (very hard!) to punch it. And was very proud of herself. 

Once all the leaves had been punched, I gave Poppet some green, blue and yellow paint (swirled together a bit with a pencil) and some sponges.

The intention was to decorate the leaves with the sponges and paint to recreate the distinctive artwork that appears in the book - kind of splotchy (proper artistic term).

This didn't appeal to Poppet, however, who was most unimpressed with the style of painting when I demonstrated on one leaf. She immediately took over, saying "I clean it!" and scrubbed furiously with the sponge until the entire leaf was uniform, plain, green. A couple of leaves that I did managed to escape without her 'improvements', but the majority were 'cleaned'.

Poppet 'cleaning' my Eric Carle art attempts

She's a very particular little Poppet.

Poppet: 2yrs 8 mos

Little: 1yr