Birthday Celebration Roundup!

Well I’ve been missing in action the last month from blog world but I’ve been busy creating in the real world.
My husband turned 60 and we decided to celebrate with a party. This threw me into a frenzy of cleaning, decorating, gardening, more cleaning and did I mention cleaning?
It’s spring here in Australia, so the house needed a Spring Clean anyway and now the big jobs like windows and carpets should stay good through to Christmas.

Because I’m obsessed with my Silhouette cutting machine – I used it for the decorating projects:

A banner:

It’s a bit bland isn’t it? My son was right when he suggested it needed a pop of colour so this was the end result after I backed each flag with different coloured card….

Yes, much better!

I used this design from the Silhouette Store but I changed out the font to a Sans Serif Stencil font called Cleanwork. I preferred it’s chunkier look for this.

I was hunting on the net for things that happened historically on M’s Birthday. Sadly throughout history it had been a pretty boring day all up on the 16th Nov. Then at about page 6 of my google search I lucked out when I found a link to the National Library of Australia and they had digital archives of old Newspapers. Lo & behold – there was a PDF file of the entire Sunday Times Newspaper (our local rag) for that day.
Headline for the day back in ’52 was “Our girls are not Heroin addicts”  – a cutting edge story about school girls getting a little high on cough medicine – all denied of course, because back in the day…well you simply couldn’t get cough medicine that contained heroin, without……wait for it…. a doctor’s prescription! LOL

I also discovered little gems such as a bottle of Coke cost fivepence. That I could pick up a Holden Car for 940 pounds and that The Elusive pimpernel with David Niven was playing at the flicks, Also did you know that Divorced and widowed women made excellent counter assistants in local shops of the day?

After lots of printing, cutting, laying out and pasting I made up a poster that celebrated that day’s news.

I used Pacifico font for the cut out lettering. On the evening of the party, I had the poster on the wall above the LapTop which was playing a slideshow of pics of the Birthday Boy through the ages.

Next  up – I  a cut a vinyl phrase inspired by an Ipad App. Yes, sad isn’t it but you did read that right! The app is called “Days Old”  you enter your birthday and it calculates how many days old you are. One of those time wasting apps!
I stuck it on the fridge (not quite straight it seems) with a then and now pic:

This was a quick project – the most time consuming part was cleaning all the other junk off the fridge door first.