Part one of my daughter’s 6th golden birthday is here.

When we went to the craft store for all things gold (for the golden birthday party) the gold pipe cleaners were kind of an impulse buy. It’s hard to resist sparkly, fuzzy gold wire. Turns out a bunch of pipe cleaners = room full of decorations in no time. I knew I wanted to do something like  Terri’s awesome wrapped pipe cleaner font project, but I skipped the yarn and spelled out Happy Birthday.  Writing with pipe cleaners is ridiculously easy (though knowing cursive comes in handy for once in your life).

Hanging them on the other hand is more difficult than it seems. There is just a lot to balance. Nothing a spool of thread an lots of tape won’t fix. Taking a photo in front of three sunny windows is also difficult, so you get the child’s eye view of the banner. A golden merry christmas would be very pretty I think, or even better something like this in gold pipe cleaners!

There were a ton of left over pipe cleaners, so I wrapped them around a star cookie cutter and voile! Also, crazy easy. And also would look lovely hanging all over a christmas tree. Seriously, I’m 33 and in love with gold pipe cleaners. I am so rock and roll.

Here is the banner and table on the evening of her party. The pipe cleaners and giant glittery 6 all sparkled in the light. I thought it was pretty magical, I’m pretty sure my big 6 year old did too. Oh, yes and a tiny gold bunting on the cake, because why not?

Right before kcwc took off this year, we celebrated my daughter’s golden birthday. The theme was gold, because we are original like that. It was a fitting theme, but a little odd–not a lot of golden party games (oh I found one though)–so we went a little crazy with the decorations.

The giant golden 6 idea came from this post for a fringey monogram. The fringey detail is super cool, but it also takes quite a bit of time, so I took a short cut and used wrapping paper–glittery, golden wrapping paper! I drew a huge six on the wall with chalk, taped the wrapping paper over it, and then cut right inside the line I drew.  The whole thing took about 1/2 hour + 1 1/2 rolls of wrapping paper.  It looks wrinkley in the photo, but the paper (and my baseboards and my floor and my hands and my face) was so glittery that I didn’t notice until I took the picture.

The humongous glittery six looked a little plain, if you can believe it, so I added those shooty out lines all around it.  Blazzam! Then with the extra bit of wrapping paper I made a golden paper chain for above the picnic table.  You can see the crazy, glittery texture of the wrapping paper a bit better here.

The actual present was wrapped in golden wrapping paper too of course.  I think it’s a sweater…