Summer Birthdays

To me the beginning of summer always signifies that it's birthday time because so many of my family members have summer birthdays. My sister-in-law and dad have birthday's in June; me, my cousin, my mom, and my brother celebrate in July; and my uncle, his lady friend, and my other cousin celebrate birthdays in August.

This year, at the start of birthday season, my parents traveled to Alaska to visit my brother and sister-in-law. And they just so happened to return home on my dad's 60th birthday. Since I knew that my parents wouldn't have anything planned for my dad's big day, I decided to make a Happy Birthday and Welcome Home banner to greet them and bake a birthday cake.

I was inspired to make my own banner's after seeing pickupsomecreativity's birthday banner 2.0 tutorial. I used black felt and fabric remnants from my local Hancock Fabrics and some blue bias tape that I had lying around the house. First, I glued each of my felted letters to the triangles and then topstitched each letter. Then, I sewed the back triangle piece to each triangle- front right sides together so that when I turned my banners to the right side my letter topsitching could not be seen from the back. Next, I topstitched around the edges of each triangle so that it would stay flat, and I attached the banners to the bias tape using a zigzag stitch.

image from MarthaStewart.com

Since my dad is a big fan of coconut, I used a Martha Stewart Coconut Layer Cake recipe for my dad's birthday cake. So, the cake was made entirely from scratch except I substituted store bought cream cheese frosting instead of homemade.

To get the cake to my parent's house, the boy and I had to put the cake in a large boiling pan since we don't have a proper cake carrier.

Ta da! Happy Birthday, everyone!