I did a ladybug/butterfly theme for my daughter's 1st birthday party (October 2005). First off, I read tons and tons of ideas on this website to put together the perfect party….so thanks
to all the moms out there that inspired me.
I started the ladybug and butterfly theme with her invitations. I dressed her up in a ladybug costume and took tons of pictures. One of my best friends designed the invitation. She placed the picture on a red and white gingham paper and put velum on top of that. It said "Our little lady is turning 1." At the top of the invitation where the velum and picture met, she had a strip of cute ladybug scrapbook paper and red ribbon to attach it all together. I sent the invitations out to friends and family with a butterfly sticker sealing the envelope and a Happy Birthday stamp on the front. For decorations, I bought several yards of fabric with ladybug and butterflies on them and sewed a red fu-fu yarn on the edges. They served as cute, colorful tablecloths. The food was arranged on a long table with the tablecloths on them and set for buffet style. The party was outside at noon so we had a huge fire pit/grill going with hotdogs and all the fixings. We had butterfly shaped sandwiches, meatballs, chips and dips with the hotdogs. I made the cake! I completed Wilton I, II, and III at Michael's to learn how to do any kind of cake. A great friend found a cute cake on the Wilton website called "Crawling towards One." I made 6 colorful cakes (2 chocolate, 2 vanilla, 1 strawberry, and 1 lemon) in the shape of a caterpillar since caterpillars turn into butterflies. That same friend made precious red lady bug cookies and I finished it off with cupcakes with red ladybugs on top (that I made from color flow icing and food markers). The cakes, cupcakes, and cookies were placed on a black table with an orange and white tablecloth. The birthday invitation was framed on the table. For my daughter's cake to get messy with, I iced a small vanilla cake with pink icing and made a yellow, blue, and purple butterfly on the top of it. My daughter wore a cute pink and silver bracelet that had ladybugs on it. I wore ladybug earrings and a red butterfly rhinestone necklace. I found cute butterfly pendants that I wore, both grandmothers' wore, and three great-grandmother's wore all day. For decorations in the back yard, we had ticki torches in the ground that had butterflies and ladybugs on them. We had large red and white Japanese balls that hung from rope over our heads (they light up at night). We had pink balloons hanging from everywhere. The backyard was very colorful. On a table inside, I had a scrapbook of my daughter's whole first year. It included pictures of her with almost everyone in the family. I also had a nice frame that had a space to put a picture of her at birth, one month, two moths, etc and a 4 x 6 picture of her in the middle for 1 year old. I took a picture of her right before the party and put that in the center. It was fun for everyone to look at how much she had changed in one year. Towards the end of the party, we had a ladybug release event where we let go 2,000 ladybugs into the gardens around the house. As party favors, every child took home a bag of goodies, bug shaped bath toys, party hat, bubbles, little toys, and a special CD a friend (the same friend that I did cake decorating with) and I made. The CD had Happy Birthday as the first song, the remaining songs were bug songs (Itsy Bitsy Spider, The Ants go Marching….etc) totaling 10 songs. One song was really sweet – it was titled "Alyssa" (my daughter's name) so we had to put that on there too. We played the music softly during the whole party so everyone could hear it. It was a WONDERFUL day!
