My baby turns One!!!

So just a quick note to say i've been offline since November as we finally moved house! So i have 3 months of things to catch up on!! I'll try to get it all done quickly so hopefully will be bang up to date soon(ish)!
Anyway so my beautiful baby girl turned 1 in October. I can still hardly believe she is already over a year old, its scary how fast time flys when you are a parent. I really would like time to slow down slightly so i can savour these wonderful years of her growing and developing and where me and her Dad are the centre of her universe!!
So we had to mark her first birthday with a little party. We hired a hall in Bradley Stoke and also hired some soft play equipment from a wonderful company called Tots of Fun. This soft play equipment really added to the party and Miley and her little friends had sooo much fun because of it.

As you may expect i had to have a go at making some home made decorations for the party. I didn't really know where to start but i was so glad i tried as it was so much fun and the decorations looked great on the day. I made a banner with a photo of Miley from each month of her first year. And i also made a Happy Birthday Miley banner which i used at the party and then again at home on her actual birthday.

The other thing i really wanted to do was make Miley a first birthday cake and for some reason i thought it was a good idea to make a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Cake. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is the only cartoon Miley watches and she loves it so i didn't feel like i had any other option, but i knew it would be a big undertaking!
I searched through hundreds of images online of different cakes trying to find one i felt i could make and one that i liked also. I finally decided on a two tier cake covered with fondant. I bought the figures from the Disney Store which was so helpful and Miley loves playing with them now.
The cake took a long time to make, i baked the cakes on the Friday and then spent nearly all day saturday decorating the cakes. Then on Sunday i took them to the party and stacked them once at the venue and also added the figures using green buttercream piped from a bag to look like grass.
All in all i was really pleased with the way the cake turned out. A couple of people at the party didn't believe that i had made it myself which is a great compliment i think to the final product (not so much to me!)

We had a wonderful party and Miley had lots of fun and was suitably exhausted at the end of it!
On her actual birthday a few days later we took her to Jump softplay in Bristol and then went to Harvester for lunch. We had a lovely day just the three of us and we both just enjoyed spending the day with our beautiful daughter who was now 1 year old.

Homemade Nursery Decorations

When i got married to my husband Simon in 2010 i made a lot of the wedding decorations myself. I'd never done anything like that before and i discovered it was sooo much fun and really rewarding to see how things came together.
After the wedding i didn't really have any need to make anything, so i put my glue gun to one side and got on with life.

Then when we found out we were expecting a little girl i just knew there would be something i could make for her nursery that would sate my need for something crafty.

I had planned on making the decorations long before the baby was due, but as things worked out we didn't finish painting her nursery until about 3 weeks before she arrived and so i spent my last few weeks of pregnancy sat on our living room floor surrounded in tissue paper and ribbon. It was hard work doing arts and crafts with an enormous belly. But, for me, it was totally worth it.

This was a garland i made to hang on the wall above her cot and also to hang from some shelves in the room.

And then these were the tissue paper pommanders i made to hang from the ceiling in the corner of her room. She has loved them since she was very young. She used to lay on her changing table and stare at them and now she is bigger if you hold her she knocks them so they swing around.

 Its lovely for me to know that something i made with my own hands provides her with some sense of enjoyment.