How time flies!! I can’t believe it’s a year already since Zoe was born – a year of giggles and cries, loads of diapers and stepping on toys!
They say a baby’s first birthday is more for the parents rather than the child – a milestone reached. Phew! With this year’s infamous coronavirus, the only course was to have a small celebration at home and invite family virtually. I started planning this about two months before her birthday just so that I would have enough time to get the theme sorted out, get the supplies and make the decor which I wanted to be almost all DIY. Oh! To add to this excitement, I also planned to bake a cake myself for her birthday.
My sister came up with the “bumblebee” theme idea and I thought it was fantastic – so I grabbed this idea and ran with it. I wanted to have everything color coordinated in yellow and black and since there would not be any guests coming over to the house, it was easier to plan for just a nice photo shoot with a cheerful bumblebee background and an online ‘meeting’ with our extended family. I looked through a couple of ideas online and saw there were heaps to choose from – I went with a photo gallery showcasing Zoe’s pics from newborn until a year old decorated with tissue paper flowers, simple crafty flowers and the milestone poster in the end.

Queen Bee’s Cake:
For the cake, I decided to go with a cheesecake instead of a traditional flavored one. The recipe I followed was from my tried and tested Annabel Karmel’s Lemon Cheesecake. Believe me, you can’t go wrong with her recipes, she uses everyday ingredients with fantastic results, which means a happy baby.
I decided to make a cake topper myself for this cheesecake and chose a pom pom cake topper design from One Fab Day. I mixed the colors around a bit to match my bumblebee theme and I was quite pleased with the result. To make the pom poms, I followed a nice tutorial which you can see below. The digit ‘1’ that you see in the image has been made out of card stock paper and painted. I removed the cake topper before any eating began. You can make your own cake banner topper by following the steps outlined in my DIY cake topper post.
The Photo Gallery:
Putting the photo gallery was a bit trickier as compared to the cake topper. The reason being I had chosen a mix of ideas for this background. The first item was a bee themed photo gallery and this is an idea I got from Pinterest, which happened to be from Etsy. I chose to make these on my own, however, feeling a tad bit adventurous in the crafting area. I used card stock paper to cut out the hexagon and the little bees. To make the hexagon, I followed Sara Adams’ helpful tutorial on it. I created a template using cardboard and then simply cut out 12 hexagons for the gallery. I then followed a similar template based process for the little bees, but in this case, the bee was a free hand drawing. I bought tiny pegs from Michael’s to hold these photo memories.

How to make these pretty hexagons:
You will need: Scissors Ruler / Measuring tape Pen / Pencil Yellow Paint color Sharpie or black paint Paint brush
- Take a piece of thick paper which can be folded. Use the tutorial (above) to make a hexagon.
- Next, take 2 sheets of card stock paper. Using the template you made in step 1, trace 12 hexagons on these sheets.
- Cut out each hexagon and paint each yellow. Keep these aside. Note that I painted just one side of the hexagon.
- Draw a honeybee outline on another sheet of card stock paper. Cut this out as a template.
- Using the honeybee template made in step 4, trace 12 honeybees (or 11 if you want to reuse the template on the photo gallery). Cut these out.
- Paint each of the honeybees yellow and leave to dry.
- Once dried, with a sharp pencil, trace out the bee stripes on each of the honeybees you’ve painted. Color or paint these stripes black. Keep aside.
- Take the hexagons and draw the digits from 0 to 11 on them. Color these digits black.
- Using glue, stick the honeybee on the right side of the hexagon and a peg on the rear side of the hexagon. Leave to dry.
- Repeat step 9 for the rest of the hexagons you’ve made.
Funny Face flowers & bumblebees:
The next item on my bee themed background were the funny face flowers. The idea behind these funny faces was to really depict the faces my little kid makes. I drew a free hand 5 petal flower on packaging paper, cut these out and then painted them a nice orangey-yellow. For the funny face centers, i drew these on card stock paper, painted them emoji yellow and drew the faces on them. I made a couple of bumblebees too to add to the top of this display. These are from regular card stock paper and painted yellow and black.
Tissue pom pom number:
I was toying with the idea of having a huge balloon ‘1’ or a DIY thing. I settled with a DIY number ‘1’ since I thought, “Why not? I am hand making pretty much the rest of it”. I have a lot of tissue paper (the gift wrapping variety) at home due to my origami hobby so this idea was very easy to source the materials for. I found this idea and DIY instructions on The Craft Patch Blog. You can read more about this craft of mine here.
