As a full time mom of twin toddlers, I am often short on time, money, and sanity (in no particular order). But as a kid blogger with a camera permanently slung around my neck, one thing I have no shortage of is photos of my babies! I was particularly thankful for this fact last week as I tried to prepare for the twins’ Little Chef birthday party. I had collected lots of wonderful inspiration on Pinterest and had tons of great ideas, but, as usual, life intervened, and I found myself with two days to get ready and no decorations in sight. Luckily, inspiration struck at the 11th hour, and I managed to create a houseful of decorations in just one evening that doubled as party favors for the adults who attended the party. What did I use? Photos, of course!
1. Posters
I wanted the twins to have some cute chef outfits to wear to their party, so I sewed them some fun aprons and hats (more about the outfits and links to tutorials I used here). I decided to dress the kids up in their fun new attire and snap some pictures of them to use as party decor. How did I get them to “pose” so perfectly? Sensory play! I opened a brand new bag of mixed beans with lots of different shapes and textures, dumped them into some kitchen bowls, and gave them a selection of utensils to play with. They had no idea I was exploiting them for photos 
I got lots of cute ones, but here are my favorites:
When I was done, I uploaded the photos to the Walgreens photo lab and had them blown up into posters. I was able to pick them up a few hours later, ready to go. I mounted four of them them on scrap foam core board and stuck them on the wall in the “cafe”…instant art! I’ll show you what I did with the fifth one in a sec!
So cute, I have yet to take it down. The “chalk board” is actually just black foam core board cut to size. We just flipped the foam board over and decorated it for Valentine’s Day!
2. Photo Bunting
Last year, for the twins’ first birthday party, I did a photo bunting/banner for each baby with a picture from each month of their first year. I was hoping to do something similar for this party featuring photos of the “highlights” of their second year. I thought I would browse through my files quickly and pick about 30 pictures. Know how many were in my party folder when I was finished? 81. 81!!!
Instead of agonizing over which ones to eliminate, I gave in and had the majority of the photos printed in 4X6 prints, again at Walgreen’s (there is one in our neighborhood). They were only 19¢ each, so it didn’t break the bank. I used the small prints in a variety of ways around the party space, but the one that had the most visual impact was the bunting.
Creating it couldn’t have been simpler- I took a few sheets of scrapbook paper in my chosen colors, cut out some triangles, and then wrangled up some turquoise yarn from my crafty stash. I strung the yarn wherever I could find an open space and then clipped the photos, alternating with the triangles, to the yarn with mini-clothespins.
The best part? My decor doubled as party favors! The majority of the guests were adult family members (grandparents, great grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc.) who love pictures of the twins. I invited the adults to take home as many photos as they wanted, since I have all the photos on my computer and didn’t have an urgent need for the hard copies. It was fun to see everyone browsing around the party area, exclaiming over the photos and selecting their favorites. There weren’t many left when the party was over, so I know they were appreciated!
3. Photo wreaths
After I hung up all the banners, wouldn’t you know I STILL had a stack of photos to use? I scanned my crafty stash once again for inspiration and settled on a few wire wreath forms that I had just waiting to be used for something. I decided to continue with the clothespin trend and clip photos onto the forms for some fun and easy wreaths. The one pictured above had all food/messy photos surrounding my fifth poster, so it followed a loose theme. The wreath pictured below was larger, so I filled the middle space with a mini-bunting embellished with felt cupcake stickers that my mom found at a craft store. The guests took these photos home as well.
I stuck some of the remaining photos on doors after mounting them on extra scrapbook paper. Low-key but bright and welcoming!
Looking for more Little Chef party inspiration? See my original party post here!
[...] borrowed an idea from Twodaloo (do love the ideas on that blog), about a really simple bunting idea/ photograph display - I [...]