messyjessy: busy busy busy crafty crafty

Part of why my blog name is messyjessy is because I am notorious for starting a project when I already have 2 dozen others in the works, or sitting out even. In the past two weeks, my project has been my grandma's 85th birthday party, and of course, the part that I was really intent on making perfect was the decoration part. Along with my mom, we decorated my grandma's party with an "85 Years of Adventure" type of theme, incorporating books and travel. And oh man, you can do a lot with old books and scrapbook sheets that are all about travel!

So here's a little visual of what we put together:

I started by buying some old books (took off their ugly paper jackets to see how pretty their binding was, and if the colors went with the party theme, and then made the decision). They were $0.99 each! I found a few reallllly neat books that I'm excited to keep - for instance, Eisenhower's "Letters To Mamie" - and suddenly Jack, my little helper who was supposed to be looking at kid books, came up to me with TWO BOOKS that were AMAZING FINDS - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (important because when I was little, my puppy chewed my grandma's copy of Jane Eyre and we've always joked about it since!) and Erma Bombeck's book, If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries - What Am I Doing In The Pits! My grandma has LONG quoted the great Erma Bombeck, and so has my husband recently! I LOVE Erma. I was SO glad Jack, my hunter/gatherer, found these books for me.

I also bought two romance novels with badly torn and tattered paperback covers, and tore them apart for a few projects:

using two four-inch styrofoam balls, and ripping pages out and then cutting them in half, I used the old yellowed aged book pages to make a book page topiary.

I just twirled the half sheets, folded the small end and glued onto the styrofoam.

hot glue.

I LOVE how it turned out. I know I saw it somewhere a while back on a blog and just mentally tucked it away, so I can't say where I found it exactly.

I knew, once I had this topiary done, the colors of the party would be cream, brown, black, and then tied in with some greens and oranges (because that's my grandma's kitchen!).

Here's how the topiary looked at the party - using some pinto beans to hold it in place in the pot with the decopauged pages stuck to it. A little rickrack to the top of the pot, and VIOLA - that pot used to be decorated for my son's mickey topiaries for his birthday party, but no more!

The book at the bottom of the pile beneath the topiary is one of those cardboard fake books from a craft store, Michael's I think, and inside was her big gift a lot of us went in on together - a Kindle loaded with 19 books for her to read!

I took some more pages, folded them in half and cut into triangles, then stapled onto a grossgrain ribbon to make a little newspaper garland. My mom and my neice and nephew folded some papers accordian style to create the pretty paper flowers, which were strewn about on the tables during the party.

I used one of the paper flowers to put together this pin for my Grandma to wear during the party.

A few more shots of the cute little garland hanging in my house before the party..

I also put together a sign to be stuck into a plant, so she'd be aware of the theme and why in the world everything was about travel and books together. Basically, my grandma is an adventurer - she's visited all 7 continents and been to hundreds of countries. But wherever she hasn't been, she's read about. She literally reads about a book a day, still, at her age, and with only one eye in full use. She amazes me.

I made a larger banner that said Happy 85th Birthday Grandma, but somehow didn't manage to get any great photos of it. Super simple. Just cut 12x12 papers into 8 x 12s, cut out some letters, chose all papers from a "world traveler" scrapbook set, and started staplin' away and using all sorts of little dots to affix letters and embellishments of travel. Turned out cute.

Found a vintage hot air ballooon by searching on google for something like "vintage air balloon vector free" and came up with this cute one that I photoshoppped and printed onto cardstock, then cut out so there'd be double sided balloons stuck on toothpicks for the cupcakes.

oh....also made some cakeballs and cakepops. LOVE how cakeballs look when you put them in tiny little truffle cups.....

And this is the wonderful cake my mom made for my grandma. It's a yellow cake inside, and she used fondant to make it look like two books stacked - the top book being JANE EYRE! The bottom is a book called Lady Chatterly's Lover - a book that was so risque for it's time that women hid it so no one would know they were reading such a "bodice ripper" as my grandma would call it. My grandma likes hot steamy romantic books. So funny!

I gave my friend Andrea the job of helping A LOT more than she needed to, and she cut up my fruit and put it on these kabobs and stuck them into the watermelon in this super decorative way. I am amazed at how creative she is! Gotta love a friend who is SO HELPFUL!

The sandwiches were also made by my mom - you can tell she's a lady of extreme detail and patience! I'd have slapped some mayo and a few chunks of salami on there in a pretty fashion, then the rest of them would have looked like my kids made them!