For my oldest daughter, Hayden's, 1st birthday I decided to do something involving the cute little animals she so loved! After looking up ideas on google, I decided to go with a jungle safari theme in soft colors. This was the first big party I got to plan since my wedding a few years earlier so I had lots of built up creative energy! Once I had a theme in mind I went to work on finding the perfect invitation. I found this one on zazzle and from that I built my color scheme. Zazzle is a great site because it's not as expensive as some of the others and the quality is just as great. You still get to customize the wording and add photos if you choose. From there I continued adding ideas and printing out photos of things that I wanted to try (a practice I swear by!). One of the best sites I found that gave me a ton of inspiration was greygreydesigns. She had a jungle theme that I pulled a lot of DIY ideas from!
From left to right: I found these adorable animal parade cupcake toppers from Meri Meri. $12.95 for 24 toppers and 24 fun cupcake wrappers! There are 4 animals in the set, 6 each of the zebra, giraffe, elephant and lion. For the paw prints chalked on the driveway, I just found an animal paw picture on the internet and printed it out on sturdy card stock. Then I used an x acto knife to cut the paw out and made it into a stencil. I placed the stencil on different spots on our driveway and front walk and colored them in with chalk! It was so easy and made such a cute introduction for our guests! The small wooden animals I found from Hobby Lobby. I bought the monkey, zebra, giraffe and tiger (the giraffe was my favorite!). I got the "Jungle Juice" idea from greygreydesigns as well, a mix of gingerale and pineapple juice. To add a touch of fancy I put it in a glass drink dispenser I bought from Bed, Bath and Beyond, similar to this one.
Now for one of the best parts of any party: The Food! I found a lot of great food ideas, many of which I borrowed from greygreydesigns (they were my biggest inspiration!). We had "Hungry Hippo Dip" which was a mix of veggies and both ranch and humus dip, "Cheetah Cheese and Crackers", and "Gorilla Grapes" which were skewers of grapes and topped with a strawberry. I cut the top of the strawberries off to make it easier to eat, I always hate when I go to eat a strawberry at a party and I have to leave a chunk of leaf on my plate! We also had our favorite Italian restaurant deliver different pasta dishes so I had yummy salad and rolls on the table.
For Hayden's smash cake my wonderful sister-in-law, Chelsea, baked a vanilla cake with cream cheese frosting and also made vanilla and chocolate cupcakes! It was a yummy way to end a perfect day! Thanks for checking out my Jungle Party and I hope it gave you some fun ideas!