Dinosaur Pastel Birthday Party

Today I want to share with you my daughter’s first birthday. I chose to have a pastel Dinosaur party to celebrate her first year of life, and our first year as parents! (Because seriously, that’s an important accomplishment too! Here is a charming first birthday with an adorable and sparkly prehistoric theme! Find inspiration for a baby girl’s birthday party below!

I shamelessly started planning my little one’s first birthday party 7 months in advance. Yes – that would have made my baby 5 months old at the time of first planning. What can I say — I like to plan things! 🙈

To be fair, I was really working hard to find my way back to being myself and my husband had just deployed so I need a long-term project to keep my mind occupied. 💪 I may have gone a little over the top for a first birthday party, but as I said, I was left totally unsupervised while planning. 😂 #SorryNotSorry

For this girly dinosaur party, I chose a pastel color palette of light pink, lavender, aqua, and mint with gold and sparkles to really dress it up – like everyone else right now. Yet while most people are going crazy over unicorn parties – we decided the theme should be dinos!

We chose to have the theme of a dinosaur party because it was important to me for my daughter to not be forced down the path of all things girly. Granted – this party oozed girly but I rationalized that since that it was dinosaurs it was better than a flat-out princess theme. 🤷

THE Dino DEETS:

• I made the dinosaur cupcake toppers using my Cricut Explore Air 2. You can find the cut image in Design Space under Create-a-Critter. Those little guys are all so stinking cute, I wish I had more opportunities to use them! 😻
• I made her cake – an all-natural organic white cake. Although it has sugar in it, I went with organic ingredients to ease my worries about her eating too much unhealthiness at her age. I used this tutorial from Life, Love, and Sugar to frost her birthday cake. It is seriously amazing how her technique can make buttercream appear smooth like fondant! It made all the difference in the world and I love that she was able to dig into her cake!
  • If your cake has been in the fridge be sure to let it come to room temperature well before cake time. Otherwise, your little one will have a difficult time getting past the cold frosting!
• The cupcakes were a bit of a fiasco – they all sank after baking and of course, I was heartbroken. Luckily after frosting them using this method by Glorious Treats (and the right tools for the job), you would have never known the centers had sunk! phew!
• We made some simple DIY floral arrangements using Trader Joe’s flowers and floral foam – Be sure to let your foam sink all on its own or your flowers won’t last as long as they could. I had that problem happen to a few of the arrangements for our wedding. Learn from my mistakes!
• With so many ways to display 12 months’ worth of photos, I decided to go with a DIY hoop. I used a dollar store hula hoop and spray painted it purple. The night before the party I attached the balloons to the hoop using the same method used to build the balloon arch. I also stuck some dollar store floral sprigs into the mix.
  • I made small bouquets of different blooms in advance using wire cutters to separate the blooms from their stem and floral tape to wrap them in place. Using this method really easy to stick them into the balloon displays on the morning of the party.

Other DIY Dinosaur Details not featured here

(but I’m going to try to find pictures for you!)

• Pastel-colored fabric and velcro Dinosaur tails for the little ones to wear around the party. It was seriously the cutest thing ever. ah!
• Overstated balloon arch.

Now that you have had a peek at the DIY details of this Real Life DIY Party I hope you now have been inspired to start planning your own Dinosaur party! Using the tutorials found by the links you will have no trouble creating your very own Real Life DIY Party. Happy Party Planning! 😘

So now it’s your turn! If you try this, tag me at @goldengluegun