Last month I had my daughter’s first birthday party, and I wanted to find a theme that was suitable for it. I’m all about the party themes. She is not really into any characters yet (other than Peppa Pig.) While I briefly considered it for a first birthday party theme, I wasn’t sure if a Pig Party would really go over well with the family. So I spent a night on Pinterest and thought a rainbow party would be super cute, fun and festive for a spunky little girl.

So I got to work pulling it all together. I headed off to the local craft store to see what I could find, and I found some rainbow stickers, rainbow ribbon, colorful markers and rainbow duct tape. I put the rainbow duct tape on some standard water bottles! And I used the markers and stickers to make little thank you tags for the party favor bags.

I also spend a few nights looking around Etsy and found an adorable outfit for her to wear. I also picked up a rainbow hair bow for her to wear and picked up a couple of extra’s for my 11 month old nieces to wear as a party favor.

I went to our local Christmas Tree Ship and picked up paper goods in the colors of the rainbow, and found two Rainbow Kites for my two nephews to have as party favors. I also scored on rainbow lollipops that I used as a centerpiece on the food table!

At this point, I had to reign myself in as I was getting a lot of ideas that really didn’t fly with my budget!

But I also found cute invitations and thank you cards from Etsy too, that the woman customized for me and I had printed out at the local office supply store. To be super creative, I addressed the envelopes using the various pen colors so that the person’s name was in red, their address in orange, the town in green, the state in blue and the zip in purple, and the commas were in yellow. On the invitations, I encouraged people to wear their favorite color of the rainbow to the party.

For her cake, I wanted to make it a custom rainbow layered cake, but decided in the end to just have a white on white cake with colorful frosting accents around the cake edge in a rainbow hue, with her birthday message in rainbow colors as well. If she was older and I had to impress her friends and their parents (you know how it goes), I might have done the rainbow layer cake, but for family, this was simply cute.

We had sandwiches and chips and a fruit salad with strawberries (red), oranges (orange), pineapple (yellow), grapes (green), and blueberries (blue).

For party favors for the adults, I found bags and stuffed them with a couple of bags of Skittles (taste the rainbow!) Then I added some Seventh Generation samples that I had received as part of a paid campaign. It was a good opportunity to share a great product with my brothers who have young children and the grandparents who often babysit for all of us. We ended up having a conversation about the benefits of organic and toxic free products too, which was fun.

All in all, I spent money in some places and saved money in others. While I wanted to get her a rainbow tutu, I realized that it was not practical. But I did get her a custom outfit, but I knew she could wear it again and again so it was worth the investment. I saved on the cake and party favors, as I was considering custom M&Ms, but in the end decided on skittles and the product samples that I think people appreciated more. I spent money on a lot of balloons to add color. It was a lot to spend on balloons, but from a decorations budget, it was pretty small.

It was a lot of fun and a cute way to celebrate a little girl’s first birthday! There is a lot you can do with this theme, and I may use it again when she turns five!