Mia's First Birthday

A couple weeks ago was my sister-in-law's niece's first birthday (it took me a while to figure out a succinct relationship rather than calling her my sister's wife's sister's daughter). First birthday luaus are a big tradition in Hawaii and people tend to go all out for them. This one was no exception. Lots of people and some really awesome Hawaiian food. 

My sister-in-law's sister asked me to help her out with some decorations. The theme was cupcakes and she asked me to make a cupcake shaped box for people to put cards in. 

She also asked for help with something for entertaining the kids at the party and asked if I could make one of those funny picture things where they have holes in the faces and you put your face in the hole and take a picture. There's got to be a better name than that. Anyone know? Does anyone even understand what I'm talking about?

Anyway...here's the cupcake I made for the cards:

The base is a plastic planter pot from Walmart. I made the top out of paper mâché. I used a beach ball as the form - worked really well and I can still reuse the beach ball!

The final layer of paper mâché was done with white printer paper and then I did a tissue paper decoupage over that. 

The sprinkles are felt. 

For the face-hole-picture thing (there has to be a better name!) I took inspiration from an inflatable monkey deco that they were using for the party (since I couldn't really put faces on cupcakes): 

 

It took a while to figure out how to make it, but I ended up with what I call the "pop-up card" design. Two large foamcore boards at an angle in back and a small one board in front. 

I'm not describing it well at all so here's a picture:

The two boards in back kind of supported each other - it also helped that the kind of curved when we painted them. 

Since the Mia portion is a separate piece the background can be used again for other events.