How To Make Custom Birthday Decor With Child’s Favorite Things

Introducing How To Make Custom Birthday Decor With Your Child’s Favorite Things, a fun new (for me) idea that I recently used for a sweet two year old, and it was such I hit I have yet to take it down! As it turns out, this little two year old has a bunch of favorite things that I’ve introduced him to in our home, some were on purpose, like Bluie the cat, goldie the fish and the Swedish wooden horse that gives kisses. His obsession with our Tinco steam wet vac was purely accidental, though we did name the wet vac Georgie, so that may have had just a bit to do with it! I know, most folks don’t give their vacuum cleaner a name, and most two year olds don’t talk about the vacuum cleaner in their sleep, so we are quite a team! Okay, lets make some fun birthday decorations, and really quite quickly, these were made just before the Succot holiday in addition to all the holiday madness!

You’ll Need:

• someone to do the graphics involved here, or maybe you can do it?

• photos of all the favorite things

• water soluble crayons

• a black waterproof pen

• cereal box cardboard, or light weight cardboard

• a glue stick

How To:

1. I used the program Indesign to size all the images imported from Photoshop, and place together in an A4 document. I then created a screen of translucent white over the images of about 80%, such that the images would print very very light, but still be visible. I made two versions with objects in two sizes. You could opt to print images very light individually if that is all that you have available.
2. I traced over the printed images with a fine line black waterproof pen, colored in the images with water soluble crayons, and then with a wet brush I smeared the color around so that i looks like I drew or painted the objects.
3. Once dry I mounted the images to cereal box cardboard and cut them out.
4. This collage of objects was assembled in the kitchen, and a few were used for the birthday cake.
5. This was truly a hit, and can’t wait to use this idea again!