Sock Monkey Party - Activities

Emily's first birthday party had a larger attendance of adults than children, so most of activities were things that all ages could enjoy. The front table had Dr. Seuss's "Happy Birthday to You" book and a sign requesting all guests to write a message for the birthday girl. I think she will enjoy that when she is older. 

The sign says: "Thanks for coming and have some fun, please sign the birthday book before you run!"

On the other side of the birthday book were some sock monkey tattoos I got at Birthday Express. I also put a damp cloth out so people could put the tattoos on. These were inexpensive but fun!

Also: The UT Co-op has everything.

This was one of my favorite stations: The "Who Looks More Like Emily" game. We enlarged and printed two pictures, one of my husband at around 1, and one of me at the same age. Then we attached them to a dry erase board and people voted. He won, as I knew he would. I was surprised by how many votes I actually got!

We also had a photo booth set up, and I made these photo booth props that looked like sock monkey hats and mouths to use in the booth. I used craft foam board and dowels to make them. 

And that is IT for the sock monkey party! It all turned out pretty well, but I was good and exhausted afterwards!

Sock Monkey Decorations #2

I made some hanging flower decorations for over the dessert table. These were so easy, inexpensive, and super cute! I used a pack of wiffle balls from the dollar store and some dollar store fake flowers. I pulled the flowers off their stems and used a hot glue gun to glue them into the holes of the wiffle ball. Then I strung them on some curling ribbon and hung them from the chandelier. I think they cost me about $7, and look how pretty they look!

I didn't get any pictures of the food table (for which I blame my husband, who was given express instructions to take pictures of everything. Apparently he didn't think I meant the food!) Our menu attempted to play on the monkey theme while also providing things people could actually eat, since the party was at noon. We had "Monkey Burgers and Monkey Tails" (hamburgers and hot dogs), "Monkey Pasta" (pasta salad), red jalapeno jelly on cream cheese with crackers, fruit skewers of strawberries and blueberries with yogurt dip, chips and salsa, chocolate dipped bananas, and banana pudding. 

I did get pictures of the drink table, where we had an assortment of sodas and "Monkey Juice", which was 7-Up and Hawaiian punch. A sock monkey helpfully held up the punch bowl. 

This was taken after the party, thus the punch bowl is almost empty. 

Even the straws were decorated. Easy and festive!

Sock Monkey Party - Decorations

Sock monkey party continued! I wanted the house to be decorated with a mixture of sock monkey items and baby-specific items. In the end, my decorations included balloons, sock monkey stuffed animals, a banner of E's pictures months 0-12, baby faces with party hats hung about the home, crepe paper, and flowers. Here are some examples.

I decorated the high chair with tissue paper pom poms. I made the party hat using this tutorial. Both were easy to do and turned out so cute!

Other guests wore sock monkey party hats I got from this site. I also got the napkins, plates, and cups from there. Pretty reasonably priced (comparable to Party City) and super cute. I also stuck E's hat from the invitation photo shoot on a decanter. Had to use it somehow!

The baby faces turned out the cutest, in my opinion. I printed pictures of her from all ages on cardstock and cut around the heads. I bought patterned scrapbook paper for the hats, and a big bag of multi-colored poms for the tops. For the ruffles, I bought about a yard of white cotton fabric and ruffled it on a sewing machine. I then cut it to length and hot glued it at the bottom of each hat.

I had taken a picture of E on each month's birthday laying on a giraffe rug. For this banner, I put each picture on alternating red and brown polka dot backgrounds and printed 6x8s of them. I then strung them on curling ribbon to hang them up. Luckily, Happy Birthday has exactly 13 letters, so I printed out the letters on cardstock and cut them out to hang underneath.

The white letters with red polka dots didn't photograph well, but looked good in person!

I also made a balloon wreath! I considered doing just cream, red, and white balloons to go with the theme, but I decided to do multicolored ones so I could use the wreath for every birthday. Thank goodness, because this took awhile! I attached a monkey-themed sign with a pipe cleaner.

A few other random decorations. Polka dot streamers, polka dot balloons, and a fireplace filled with balloons!

Sock Monkey Party - Desserts

So the sock monkey party has come and gone, now it's time to go over everything!

I'll start with the desserts. My icing skills are not always great, but I did my best. I made monkey cupcakes for the party goers and a chocolate smash cake for the birthday girl.

The dessert table

The monkey cupcakes were yellow cake with chocolate icing. I displayed them on my (luckily!) red and white cake plate from Crate & Barrel and my red cupcake holder from Target. It was lucky for this party's colors that my favorite color is already red!

I used regular Nilla wafers for the mouth/nose area, and mini Nilla wafers cut in half for the ears. TIP: when you cut the mini Nillas, saw them with slight pressure from the knife rather than cut. They will stay together better and you'll have less loss. I used chocolate chips for the eyes - you could also use black icing, but the chips were faster and I had a lot of cupcakes to ice! They are also pretty cute. The mouths are red gel icing in the tube - easy peasy.

Half the mouths were open and half were closed, just for funsies!

I used a 6 inch spring form pan to make the chocolate smash cake. I bought mine at Michael's, which was the only place I could find any 6 inch pan. It was the perfect size - obviously Emily barely ate any of the cake, but it is mostly for looks anyway. It was a good size for icing. They also make a 4.5 inch spring form pan, but it felt too small. I used vanilla and chocolate buttercream for the monkey. The eyes are vanilla buttercream with a drop of black dye, and the mouth and hat are dyed red. (Which actually looked more pink in person - a true red is really, really hard to get. I would probably use the red gel icing if I did it again.) 

Not the best icing job in the world, but passable.

 I also made a candy cake with red, white, and brown M&Ms, surrounded by Kit-Kats and tied with a pretty red polka-dot bow. The original link I saw for this uses cake topped with M&Ms, with the Kit-Kats iced to the outside. I already had more than enough cake, so I turned a 9 inch round cake pan upside down, iced the Kit-Kats to to outside with a little chocolate buttercream, and put the M&Ms on top. It worked perfectly!

Can't even tell there's a cake pan under there!

Everything turned out pretty well, and it all tasted good, which is the most important part!