{a valentine's party}

This year, we got more than our fair share of hearts, as we hosted a Valentine's party for Tilly and her friends. Oh, to be one again, and get a dozen cards from your favourite people!

Of course, most of the photos turned out to be a blur of children bouncing off the walls and each other. Here are some of the sweet moments in between -- you'll just have to imagine the rabble of other children just outside of the picture, and add in about two-hundred pompoms. (Yes, the kids loved to dump them out, but, admittedly, Terri and I started it by trying to get a 'raining pompoms' photo with poor, unimpressed Jackson)

One of Tilly's best friends couldn't make it, but sent along a little Valentine's card with a photo of himself in it. It is now officially the most looked-at piece of paper in our house.



Hope you had a lovely day, too, and were lucky enough to enjoy a festive cupcake or two!

{the leaning tower of cupcakes}

Step back in time two weeks. Take one ninetieth birthday party, two days to get it all sorted, three tons of moving supplies from my parents' garage, and a glimpse of this Lakeland cardboard beauty. It could only be a job for the butcher, the baker, and the cupcake stand maker.

It all centred around sliding artist's palette-shaped cardboard pieces onto an old kitchen roll. Now, if Kate Spade or Paul Smith made kitchen roll, this is what it'd look like: brightly striped. Unfortunately, neither of them has had that idea yet, so I used coloured tape (that matched our cupcake flags) to cheery the whole thing up a bit. Because, let's face it, bare cardboard hardly says "Get your party on." 

What does say "Get your party on" is a dozen Bakewell cupcakes (again, from our recipe, inspired by Britain's second best amateur baker, Holly). As do the Union Jack cake cups. But what most definitely does not help the party mood is when adding the cupcakes to your cupcake stand makes the whole thing topple over. Ever think you're going to be the least popular person in the room? Well, drop twelve Bakewells on the floor fifteen minutes before a hoard of hungry pensioners arrive, and you will be. Guaranteed.

Kitchen weights to the rescue. Of course, meticulous Holly might throw a razor-edged meringue at me if she were to see her prized cakes being served on such a precarious pile of old cardboard and rusting metal. But she'd have to throw it rather hard to reach me in Texas, so I feel relatively safe showing you the photos now.

So, there you have it -- cardboard box to cupcake monstrosity in twenty-five moderately difficult steps. What can I say, at least it didn't overshadow the cakes. Which were, as always, scrummy. 

{diy: washi tape flags}

Washi tape. Chances are you've seen a roll in a pattern you can't resist, and bought it. Chances are, once you've got one roll, you've decided to become a washi collector. Chances are, you now have an entire cupboard piled high with red tape, blue tape, tape with musical notes, with Japanese stamps, with the entire words of Shakespeare printed in miniature. 

But what do you actually do with the stuff?

You make flags. And then you make cupcakes. And then you stick the flags into the cupcakes and have a jolly good time.

Having made millions hundreds dozens of little flags for Mossa's birthday earlier this week, I've got the method down. Is it so basic that you could probably do it in your sleep already? Yes. Am I going to share it anyway? Yes. It might save you a bit of awkward finger/scissor/tape/cocktail stick manoeuvring.

(Are you drooling over those cakes above? Bakewell Cupcakes, baked by my sister, Alice, they use The Best Cupcake Ever recipe that I shared the other day)

You'll need:

• scissors
• cocktail sticks (long or short. I prefer long as you can cut them to make short ones, too)
• washi tape

Pull one end of the tape out, a good ten centimetres, and place the unpokey (i.e. 'blunt', for people who use 'real' words) end of a cocktail stick in the middle of the length of tape.

Fold the end of the tape over the top of the cocktail stick, sticking it to the tape on the other side of the stick. (Note: at first I was very worried about lining up the edges on both sides of the tape, but then got over myself and decided it looked quite nice uneven anyway.)

Snippy snippy. One straight cut, to separate the flag from the roll of tape, and two pointy cuts, if you like the snake-tongue effect. 

Here's another case of unnecessary worrying -- I oh-so-carefully measured the first two or three flags, and then decided that it was all a bit faffy, really, and decided to enjoy a variety of lengths of flag. Perfectly imperfect. Or, so I tell myself. We also scribbled '90' onto the flags in a very imperfect and blobby blue biro. 

We stuck the flags in cupcakes. We stuck them in Fruit Pastilles. We stuck them in Cadbury's Giant Chocolate Buttons. We slotted them into the holes in Polo mints. I even poked a couple into the tail feathers of my Mum's favourite straw chickens, to give them a bit of festive 'pluck'. In short: stick a flag in anything, and it becomes more exciting. 

So, tell me: am I wrong? Do you have tons of uses for washi tape? Have you never heard of the stuff, much less been tempted to buy any? Or do you, in fact, have the complete works of Chaucer on washi tape instead?

{a ninetieth birthday in photos}

It's the end of a long day of party poppers, pass the parcel, and Polo mints -- a ninetieth birthday party with personality. As all of our energy has been used up, scrambling to get the biscuits baked before the old folks arrived for their lunch, I'm simply going to show you some photos and go to bed. (With a leftover biscuit... or two!) 

{hello world, it's me, tilly}

Tilly's gone global. Find her sharing tips and tricks from her "Say Cheese" birthday party today over at the brilliant Ohdeedoh (the children's section of Apartment Therapy).

Or, if you've had enough cheddar, cameras and birthday party pics to last you a lifetime, why not check out these other inspired ideas:

• London-in-a-bag wooden block set
• The best apps for traveling with kids (please, remind me of this in a month, as we fly across the world with a wriggly jiggly fourteen-month-old)
• Cloudy day blackout shades
• Build your own bicycle sidecar (with two seats -- one for Tilly, one for Bella!)

{diy: soft speech bubbles}

Prepare yourselves -- it's going to be a pretty photo-heavy week here at RedRed. Two new cameras (mine and Tilly's), plus a camera-themed birthday party coming up on Saturday. Phew. We'll need our shutters cleaned at the end of this week.

Today, I was making some of the props for the party. I love the idea of little speech bubbles for guests to hold, and set about making some myself out of poster board.

Have you ever tried cutting poster board? It's tough! You hack through one layer, find the tricky board in the middle, and by the time you're through to the other side, you've run out of blade. I tried scissors, a box cutter, an extra sharp fancy paper knife. What worked best, in the end, was Justin's pocket knife and it's seven inch serrated blade. I was very scared for my cutting mat (and my fingers, too), but luckily both survived unharmed.

The edges, though, looked a little rough. Okay, very rough. Like I'd cut them blindfolded. At night. One-handed. With a blunt chainsaw.

Enter half-a-yard o' cream fleece. I simply lay the poster board bubble on top of the fleece, and drew around it, leaving about an inch of extra fleece all the way around.

Ah, the scent of a hot glue gun hard at work. I put a thin layer of glue all around the edge, and pressed the fleece up (being careful not to put my fingers directly over the hot glue -- it burns even through the fleece).

Then, with a quick trim of the excess fleece from the back, the boards were covered. The fleece did a lovely job of softening the hacked-up edges of the poster board.



A few snips in a bit of felt, and we had our messages. Obviously, 'Cheese!' was needed...



... and when I looked through my stash of rejected letters I'd cut for our 'Stars at Night' hanging, the letters spelled out 'Hooray'! Perfect.

To attach the letters, I simply turned them all upside down and gave them a hearty spray with Krylon adhesive. There's a another nice smell for you. Not.

So, there you go. How to make speech bubbles for your photo booth that don't look like something Edward Scissorhands could have made. I can't wait to put them to use...

{in a bind}

Patchwork binding. What was I thinking?

I cut out hundreds of 2x4s, but still had to go back twice and cut more. Stitching them together was the fun part, but attaching the binding was an absolute nightmare. I'm a total binding noob (as my brother would say) anyway, but trying to do mitred corners with a four inch wide strip of patchwork was actually impossible. Not just messy, but standing up like a basket. So, snip snip snip, I cut the whole strip of binding in half, and traded in bigger squares of patchwork round the edge for corners I could live with.

(Plus, I now have a bonus strip of 2" wide binding to use on something else. Score!)

So, what actually is it, you ask? Well, it's a birthday table runner for Tilly.

But there's a twist. 

I'm going to ask all of our party guests this year to sign it, and then I'll stitch over their names. And then I'm going to ask everyone who celebrates her second birthday with us next year to sign it, and on and on for every birthday, until we have one piece of fabric with every single birthday guest's name embroidered onto it.

I'm thinking I'll use a different colour of thread for each year, or perhaps have a different section of the runner for each year. The exact details aren't worked out yet. But the binding is, and after that, everything will seem like a piece of (birthday) cake...

{inspiration: photo booth}

Loving this idea of props on sticks from Oh Happy Day (they even have free printables over there for you to make your own). And what's cuter than adults and tiny fluffy dogs all dressed up? Why, babies all dressed up, of course! 

Yes, I'm thinking about having a few props on hand for Tilly's birthday party, for a few laughs. And, for any older children, it might be fun to have some plain white outlines (of bows, for example), so they can colour their own.

P.S. The party dress for Tilly, which is supposed to be worn to a wedding this weekend is no, not made yet, but yes, looking possible. A bit of topstitching here, a join in elastic there, and we'll be made. Fingers crossed that it fits!