At one year old, baby doesn’t have a strong opinion on birthday theme, so I went with a Rooster, since he was born in 2017, Year of the Rooster. I used the same logic for his older sister’s first birthday, but she was born in 2012, Year of the Dragon. This is arguably a wee bit cooler. Believe it or not, it’s not so easy to find rooster- themed party supplies, ha. So I had to get creative and did the best we could with the rooster. I found a cute caricature of one online, and ran with it where it made sense for this little boy’s Korean first birthday.
We made the doljabi poster, icons for the glasses, and voting tickets (wish I had a better picture of those.) You’ll see we recycled some of the design from big sister’s dol. I purchased the graphic of the little boy wearing a hanbok off etsy and used it throughout the decor.
I purchased the wishing tree branches from a craft/hobby store and made the tags using a label punch on cardstock. Then I added a strip of patterned gold washi tape to the bottom to give it a little more personality. That said, it would have been nice if the tags were a little longer to give people more room to write their messages.
This lovely 3-tier cake was created by the wonderful Joy of Joy’s Cake Studio. It was as delicious as it was beautiful! She also made a smash cake for us, which had an ombre whipped cream frosting effect and is ever-so-slightly visible in the foreground of the picture above.
We ordered the rainbow rice cake (dduk) and mini-boxes of dduk for our guests to enjoy as a thank you.
I made rooster peeps in cups, and wrapped them in clear cello bags for the kids. (More on that below.) To give credit where credit is due, Rose Chang Photography is responsible for the lovely pictures above, and I took the not-as-lovely photos below.
Here’s a close up of the rooster Peeps before they were wrapped in cello bags. As luck would have it, we happen to live not too far from a Peeps store (yes, they exist!) So we went in one day, and swooped up a good portion of their white peeps inventory. We added the red heart sprinkles, attached with melted white chocolate. And the roosters are sitting on a bed of green grass paper, and below that we added a layer of dark chocolate covered raisins, to represent soil. It has the added bonus of adding a little weight to the cups, and also being just delicious.
This is another look at the letters on the table; we ordered craft letters online, and wrapped them in yarn. It was so. time. consuming. If you want to try it, I suggest using a thicker yarn! The letters now sit on a shelf in the baby’s room, so at least it wasn’t a make-and-toss project.
