Being Mamma Bear

I knew very early on that Laddoo’s first birthday theme would not be about any cartoon character for two reasons:

1. She has no favourite characters yet, and
2. Even if we did pick something from a nursery rhyme she enjoys, there was no way she would understand the corelation when she looked at her party decor.

So we went with something that would make me happy. I think the tone for her birthday theme was set way back when I had my Baby Shower (that I still haven’t blogged about 🙈) but it was reinforced when Nishita from Little Pixie Clothes messaged me on Insta way back in June. She told me that she’d love to make a dress for Laddoo’s first and that she knew I loved rainbows 😍 and would love to do something around that theme, or any other theme.

First of all, wow! I haven’t been very vocal about my love for rainbows. On my personal insta, maybe, but not on beingmammabear. So for her to notice and remember just shows her attention to detail. And not only did that impress me, it also got me thinking, and I realised that I needed to start planning.

It didn’t take long for us (I planned this with my sister) to figure it out. I looooooveee pastels (that was the theme for my baby shower)…

…and now I knew I wanted rainbows, and when we put those two together, we got a nice pastel rainbow which screamed UNICORN! And that’s how we ended up with a UNICORN theme. 🦄

We had two celebrations – a small gathering at home with immediate family and Laddoo’s friend Cookie, and the second one on the weekend where we invited extended family, friends and other relatives.

For this post, I am going to be talking about the party at home.

We had a simple cake cutting followed by dinner that we ordered in, so there wasn’t any planning required for this, as such. The only mehenat was the chalkboard, the rainbow background and the cake(s) that I made from scratch.

Let’s start with the simplest one…

The First Birthday Chalkboard

I know I could have easily outsourced this, but the creator in me wouldn’t be satisfied if the fonts weren’t just right or if the colours were a tad bit darker than the pastel shade I wanted. So in order to avoid all that grief, I designed the chalkboard myself.

I make all my posters in a program called GIMP which is basically exactly like Photoshop except that GIMP is a free software. I downloaded a Chalboard photoshop template (.psd file, which can be opened with GIMP) and this is what the original design looked like.

I downloaded the template from Timeout with Mom and the post has a bit of a tutorial on how to edit and use the file and a list of amazing chalkboard fonts.

If you want to know how to design / edit a chalkboard file in GIMP, here’s a tutorial for you. There’s also a free chalkboard background for your to download 😊 And if you do a google search, you will find many more tutorials (even video tutorials) on using GIMP.

Being a sucker for fonts and graphic design myself, I have over 2,000 fonts on my machine and I am nerdy enough to be able to identify many a fonts by their name just by looking at them 😆 I also have many free design elements downloaded so I used those, and for ones I did not have like the tooth, ruler, and weights, I downloaded vector images (which I made sure are free for personal use. This means I can use them to create anything for myself but cannot sell or make money out of using these elements. It also means, unfortunately, I cannot reupload here for sharing. And I browsed through so many options that I did not save links for the ones that I finally used.)

So here’s how mine is different.

As you can see I have only used the dotted lines from the template and even then I have coloured it. I used my own choice of fonts, expanded the colour palette to include Lavender, Peach-ish Pink, Yellow, Mint Blue and Mint Green. You can also see a rainbow, a unicorn, clouds, a heart, a candy, and some twinkling stars – all free vector downloads that were edited to match my colour scheme. I also added the guides for alignment.

Fonts & Colours

Fonts Used

1. Buttercup
2. Candy (Texture version) – was free for commercial use when I downloaded it, now it’s a paid font.
3. Celia Garcia

Colours

The Final Chalkboard

Here’s what the final chalkbaord looked like:

And this is how it looked once we got it printed. The size is 2′  x  3′ and it was printed at a local printer-cum-xerox place on Vinyl and mounted on a 5mm sunboard after lamination. And we asked them to use eco solvent print for a better colour (specifications were shared with me by Tamanna Bavishi after she got it printed for her son’s birthday that was less that two weeks before Laddoo’s.)

That’s all I have for you now. Next time, I will show you how I made the background Rainbow and then, the Birthday Cake(s). You know the best part? The colours on the chalkbaord, rainbow, and the cake all are the same and in the same order.

Curious?

Wait for my next post. 😊

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I am taking part in The Write Tribe Problogger October 2017 Blogging Challenge.