Ciao Italia! An Italian Birthday...

Ciao! It was just birthday party time around here, and my youngest wanted an Italian-themed party this year...one problem...almost every major party supply store in our area has closed.  But, I decided to look on the bright side and see this as another opportunity to personalize the event using decorations we made together.  Major bonus! 

This project started with a quick trip my craft room to gather up what we had in the way of green, red and white supplies (the colors on the Italian flag).  Well, we had lots of white paper of course, so my daughter started by making some flags to decorate the top of her cake using some watercolor paint, skewers and glitter.  Lucky for us, the Italian flag is very easy to replicate! The photo above is of the finished project proudly displayed on her cake which was served on a pizza pan.  The decoration is all buttercream, even though it kind of looks like m&m's on the top.  My daughter just took a cake decorating class this summer with my mom where she learned how to do this frosting technique using a round tip (#12), and dragging it to one side with a offset spatula.  Simple, but effective.  Oh, and speaking of simple, look in the background of the cake photo and you'll see in place of some flowers, I cut some Italian parsley from our garden and put it into spaghetti sauce jars.


Next, came the invitations.  As mentioned in previous posts, I use PrintShop 2...a lot. So, my daughter and I sat down and came up with this design.  We downloaded the free clipart from the internet of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and used the very cool font called "Draft Handwriting" for the large words.  The card stock is one of my go-to party items from Target, it's a box of 50 blank flat-panel cards (in other words, not a folded card) and 50 envelopes for only $9.99. The cards are 5"x8", and come in white and ivory. Such a deal!

Now, back to those DIY decorations...using some natural twine, Dollar Store streamers, and leftover Christmas tissue paper we made these cuties below for around the house...and, caped it all off with a personalized chalkboard in Italian for over the mantle with the evenings' menu! Antipasto trays, spaghetti and meatballs, Caesar salad, rustic bread, and our version of a cannoli cake (pound cake with mini chocolate chips) and ice-cream.  It was a great party, after all, you only turn 12 once! Ciao!