This past weekend Chef Kev, Chace and I went to to a birthday party for a very special three-year old girl named Aubrey. She happens to live next door so naturally, her mom and I drink wine, er, ah I mean watch the kids and laugh at all their antics together.

Obviously Aubrey and Chace will marry someday.
So it was the least I could do to help make cupcake toppers for my future daughter-in-law’s third birthday party.
Her favourite show is Backyardigans so that was the theme of her party. And the theme of her cute little custom cupcake toppers.
To make these toppers you will need the following things:
– print out of your topper art. I designed mine in Adobe Indesign but you should be able to use any program that allows you to place graphics. I purposely left the art for each ‘pick’ without a border. I’ll explain why later. And naturally the theme can be changed to suit your own party theme.
– two circle punches of different sizes. I used a 1.5″ and 2″ circle
– tape runner (or double sided tape tabs)
– glue gun
– lollipop sticks
And you will also need some scrapbook paper. Here are a bunch I pulled. I pulled a wide range but Aubrey’s mom and I narrowed it down to a smaller palette once we started putting the Backyardigan picks together.
As mentioned above, I purposely did not put any border on the circle toppers. The reason being that it’s hard to line things up exactly perfectly when cutting, and eliminating the border allows that bit of variance that inevitably happens. For the ones where the colour goes right to the edge I actually added a bit more image (called ‘bleed’) which allows you to be less than perfect when punching and not have a funky white imperfect edge.
If you don’t already own punches, I’d suggest getting ones that have an open bottom. That way you can visually line up your image upside down as you punch and see that it is centred. Use the 1.5″ circle for this part.
Punch! Booyah. One Backyardigan down.
Flip your little dancing hippo over and add a bit of tape with your tape runner.
Use your larger 2″ punch to cut a shwack of coloured paper.
Layer your Backyardigan over it’s new paper backing. It’s exciting day in Backyardigan land people.
The party hasn’t even started yet but these little guys were in full force.
In addition to the Backyardigan characters I did some that had the number “3” on them and some that said “Happy Birthday Aubrey”. 
Flip over and apply a bit of glue (versus the gallon you see here), quicky apply your lollipop stick and let dry.
And with that – the party is on! Well, actually there is the whole part of making and icing the cupcakes but that’s for another day 😉
For our purposes we’ll just fast forward to the party shall we?
How ridiculously cute are those little white picket fences that Aubrey’s mommy found at Michaels? PERFECT!
And what is a picket fence without some green grass? I guess it’s just a dirt patch. It was just a retorical question. No need to answer.
I love how the ones in the foreground look like little flowers in a garden.
It was a great day. Happy Birthday Sweet Aubrey! I’ll recycle this idea for the bridal shower I throw you in 25 years.
So, what did you get up to this past weekend? A birthday party? Good times with friends? Or perhaps you attended a bridal shower 25 years in the making (awkward). 

Weekend Bloggy Reading

Liz Marie Blog
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