It never ceases to amaze me how tiny the huge world wide web can be sometimes!! I did take the cake smash photos, to get the background white I do a curves adjustment layer and then take the white eyedropper and click on the white background. That sets the white point but also makes baby too bright so I then go back and paint with a black brush on the layermask over Jasper to tone down the effect. I hate using white backgrounds though – I JUST bought some colored ones (check out tomorrows post!) and wish I’d used one of those.

I did publish the cake recipe, check out the “recipes” category from the right sidebar… there are only like 3 in there (I’m not much of a cook!) so it should be easy to find.

Glad you found your way here, hope you stick around!

For the banner I just purchased two coordinating color sheets of solid colored paper from the scrapbook
section of the craft store.. we had 26 letters so I did half blue and half yellow.

Then, I did a design in illustrator that used blue and yellow and just inverted every other letter. So half the letters were blue and half yellow. Then I printed out all the letters and cut the circles out. I used a plate to create circles on the colored paper that were slightly bigger than the printed out circles and then glued the printed circles onto the colored paper circles.

To string it you can use any coordinating color ribbon. Cut two vertical slits with a utility knife or whatever and then just string the ribbon through those two slits.. this link explains that part better than I am explaining:
http://www.holidash.com/party-central/birthday/decorating/how-to-make-a-birthday-banner

and here’s another cute (more girly) option:
http://katydidandkid.blogspot.com/2009/03/kitchen-table-crafts-birthday-banner.html

Hope that helps!

Who sang that song? That also made me cry.

I can’t believe Hunter will be 1 in a few months. Thank you for doing it all ahead of me and sharing what you learn. You are awesome! And you are an awesome mommy.

:)