A Very Hungry Caterpillar Birthday Part 1

Ben & Ellie turned one two weeks ago, and now that we've all recovered, I wanted to share what I did for their birthday. I did a lot (no surprise, really!), so I'll spread it out over several posts. Today - invitations and decorations.

I saw this idea a while back and loved it. However, since I had to mail our invitations, I opted not to use glass jars. Small peanut butter jars seemed ideal! My friend and neighbor helped me save up enough small jars (we usually use large jars, but her peanut butter only comes in this small size!). We washed them throughly and use sticky removal stuff to get the labels off. It took a while, but was worth it! (Special thanks to hubby for scrubbing the more stubborn labels!).

I didn't use the pottery barn template - instead I printed a simple leaf (I searched for a leaf coloring page - this is a good way to find outlines of things!), and traced it onto cardstock and cut them out. I wrote out the information and used a hole punch at the top to look like the caterpillar had munched it.

I used green pompoms for the caterpillar body, and red for the heads. I had a hard time finding a bag of pompoms that had enough green ones, so I ended up buying a Christmas bag! Thank goodness JoAnn's has that stuff out year round! (Plus we now are ready for Christmas crafts!). I opted not to do eyes, but did glue on bits of pipe cleaner for antennas.

Stick a leaf and a caterpillar into each jar, and voila! They weighed almost nothing, so they weren't expensive to mail, which was nice!

Sorry I don't have a better picture - just remembered to snap this one before we sent them all out!

We did simple decorations. I found these butterfly dangles at Dollar Tree and grabbed them.

And we made a caterpillar from balloons.

I also made a birthday banner for them, but I'll share that another day, as I wrote a tutorial on it for making your own! 

More to come - activities, food and clothing!