Townes' 3rd birthday is coming up next week and it has me, as most mom's do, thinking back on his first birthday and how much he has grown. I love throwing parties and so when his first birthday came around I was just tickled to throw my very first kid's party. I had probably started thinking about it from the day I got him home from the hospital honestly, just casual thoughts about what we could do.
Its hard to pick a theme for a one-year olds party because, let's be real, they don't really have interests. I mean, sure they are into food and toys and sleeping, but who isn't and anyway, those things don't really make for much of a party theme (though now that I've said that, I'm starting to wonder if I couldn't throw an adorable "nap themed" party for a baby - stay tuned, I'll work on it - I'm thinking some sheep and clouds and cozy blankets....) Shit, sorry, I digress.
Townes' first birthday wasn't shaping up like I thought it would because first of all, we weren't living in our house. We were four months into our HUGE remodel and living in a rental so I already felt disjointed. Also, I hadn't anticipated how bummed I would be at the idea that all of my family probably wouldn't be there since they live in New York, California, Washington and elsewhere that isn't here.
However that is where I got the theme, in missing my NY family, I decided Townes' birthday could still pay homage to them in some way and so we did a NY theme with T, starring as King Kong. We had Nathan's hot dogs, hot pretzels, and a popcorn bar. There was a King Kong pinata and a custom made cake to look like a skyscraper for King King Townes' to smash (it was the Frost Tower, which is here in Austin, so we had a little Texas sprinkled in). I even made favors for everyone to take home that were "bagels in a jar" - I filled large mason jars with all the dry fixings to make homemade NY Style Bagels, topped them with a cute label that said I Heart NY and a tag with the recipe and instructions.
The crowning jewel of this party theme though was the invitation. We had an adorable black gorilla costume for Townes and we decided we wanted to make a video of him walking through towers of cardboard blocks and knocking them down - that idea ended up posing a few problems: 1) he couldn't walk yet, 2) what exactly would we do with said video, and 3) he was having no part in any of it at all, just wanted the damn gorilla hat off.
After some more brainstorming and discussing, Chanel and I decided to scrap the video idea and make a flip book. At the time the plan was to give them out as favors to people at the party. So we dressed him back up, set up the blocks and tried again, this time rapid shooting stills with our camera. No luck again. He wouldn't cooperate.
Back to the drawing board, one last time. We went back to something he knew. Since he had been doing his chalkboard photos for a year we knew he would cooperate that way. So we drew the skyline of Austin (another subtle nod to his hometown) on the board and tried to get him to walk in front of it. Nope. Finally we gave him his chair and a banana (his favorite snack) and went with what made him happy. SUCCESS!
Then when I started making the flip books I thought, I should mail them to the people who can't come - then it occurred to me to just make them the invitation and send them to everyone! It was adorable and everyone loved it. I chose black envelopes to go with the theme (from Paper Source, as always) and then chose a vintage NY subway map wrapping paper for the liner. I printed labels for the front of the envelope that invoked a little film making with the washi tape and they were all set! My favorite part was the little message on the last page, letting everyone know we loved them and that this was a keepsake if they couldn't come, which lots of people couldn't.
Like the idea? Here are some tips on how to do it yourself - its not hard I promise!
Shooting the Photos
At this point, you can do this with just about any camera. Most digital cameras, even basic ones will let you hold down the shutter button and will just keep auto-focusing and shooting. We used my Canon Rebel, but you could get the same effect on your iPhone with the Burst feature.
It doesn't have to be anything super planned. We happened to have a theme, but the book will capture the equivalent of a 5-10 second video. That's not a lot. So if there is something you love about your little one (a funny face, the way the laugh, how they eat, anything) it will be a cute flip book. They just need to be moving.
Lastly, if you can, use a tripod. If you aren't moving then the frame of the photos will all remain the same and will look best in a book because the only moving part will be your kiddo, not the angle of the photo. This will also allow you to apply the same edits and crop to the whole batch of photos instead of doing each one individually and hoping they match up - trust me this saves a lot of time.
The Cover
I made the cover using (gasp!) Microsoft Word. All my graphic designer friends would be appalled (not even would be, T's godfather is a super talented graphic designer and he repeatedly tells me he is) but its software I am comfortable with, already own, and can intuitively figure out since I've been using it since elementary school. I just pull up a blank publishing document, adjust the page layout to be the size I need (in this case 2 x 3) and then go to work adding text boxes, clip art, and so on.
Then what you need to do is save the page as an image and you are ready to go!
The Book
There are a two ways you can go about assembling the book depending on your time, budget and patience.
THE DIY WAY
This is not the way I ended up going because I was making so many (I used about 45, we sent them to everyone - first kid overkill if you will). But what you could do is print each of the photos on photo paper, cut them to size, and fasten them together with glue and some thread.
What you would do is cut each photo out leaving a 1/4 inch border on the left side. Add two small pin holes in the top and bottom quarters of the border (in the same spot of each photo, like the edge of binder paper). Stack up all your photos (NOT THE COVER), and apply a little bit of glue using a glue stick on the border and glue them all together in order. Once they are glued together, thread a needle and go in one hole, out the other side and then in the other hole and out the other side, twice around creating a secondary way to hold the pages together.
Finally, attach the covers. The front and back covers should be printed as one long strip, with enough space in the middle to wrap around the bound edge of the book. Use glue to secure the cover pages to the binding area and you are done!
This is pretty simple, if you are making just a couple, but its A LOT of work if you are making more than like, five. So I went with the other method.
ORDERING THEM PRINTED
Turns out, iPhoto has a flip book option in their projects! Yes, you can order a flip book directly from your iPhoto! This was the method I chose. All my photos were already in iPhoto so I just added my cover photo to my Library, made a new project and followed the instructions.
At the time, you could order them in a pack of three for $9. Now this is more expensive than lotsof other types of invitations, but I never said this was an exercise in cost-efficiency. The iPhoto project also allowed me to add the final page of text and that was my favorite part. I am sure that also with some digging other photo printing apps and sites would offer a similar project.