Welcome to Birthday Week! Ahhh, birthdays. We all have one and when it comes to our kids some of us go a bit crazy celebrating them. Since both Kieran and I recently had birthdays, I thought it would be fun to spend a week talking about birthday celebrations as related to scrapbooking. Not just making scrapbook pages, but also all the ways we can use our scrapbooking supplies for birthday celebrations. Here is what this week will look like:
Monday: Inspirations and Ideas - where to find them and how to keep track of them and your party planning.
Tuesday: Using scrapbook supplies to create invitations, party decor, goodie bags and more.
Wednesday: Birthday Traditions and Photos
Thursday: give.away.day
Friday: Scrapbooking Birthdays
Saturday: More Scrapbooking Birthdays
So, on with the show!
I love parties and celebrations, and it's possible that I love dreaming up party ideas more than the parties themselves! I'd always had birthday parties growing up, and I of course want the same for Kieran. So starting last year I spent a lot of time coming up with ideas for his special days. Thanks to the numerous blogs I read I found a bunch of fun ideas that I wanted to incorporate in his celebrations.
Where did I find these ideas? Well imagine my delight when I came across a blog last year called Birthday Girl. Hello?? Not only does she post inspiration boards that she develops for her clients (or just because), but she also features images from birthday parties that her readers send in. I took a page from her book and made a little inspiration board for Kieran's 1st birthday.
At that time I'd decided that the theme would be kites and pinwheels. I also wanted to include a bunting, have cupcakes and make him a birthday crown. I went to Flickr and searched for all these terms, then used the images I liked to create the mosaic using the tool at Big Huge Labs.
Not being the most organised person in the world, I needed a way to keep track of it all. I used a combination of bookmarks in delicious and jotting things down in a notebook in order keep things accessible when I was ready to put the plan into action.
This year I upped the ante with Pinterest, my new obsession. If you're not familiar with Pinterest (and why on earth aren't you? you need to be!), it's a social bookmarking site where you can find and store ideas visually. It's the perfect medium for us creative types! What's great about it is that it can be used both to find inspiration and to keep track of it. I started off earlier in the year by pinning a bunch of ideas I loved to my Event Ideas board. Once it got closer to Kieran's birthday, I created a new board just for ideas specific to his birthday theme (this year the theme was the Pixar movie Up!)
I didn't use a paper based system at all this year, because I have a bad habit of noting things down on random bits of paper, or in numerous notebooks, and then losing them. So I tried out an another online application called WorkFlowy, which definitely kept me on track. Here's a screen shot of my lists in action.
I tell ya, I was amazed that I kept up with this system, but it is easy to use, with very few frills. Their tagline is "Organize Your Brain" and it's true! I created categories for everything, like Decor, Food, Activities, etc. then broke them down into smaller tasks which I crossed off as they were completed. Mind you, I was still up past midnight finishing things up on the two nights before the party, but that's a whole other story!
Ok, enough with the planning already! Tomorrow we'll talk about using scrapbooking supplies to create the ideas we bookmarked, and I'll share some of the details from items in these photos.
See you then!
