60th Birthday Makings

Now that his big day has been and gone, I can share some of the things we made for my dad's 60th birthday last week.

 

We arrived home at my parents' a couple of days before his birthday, which gave us time to work on a few decorations.

 

My mum has a rather large collection of jam jars which I raided to make these candle holders.

 

 

 

A few doilies and some ribbon and they were ready to decorate the table for the birthday dinner.

 

 

 

 

 

I wish I could say that the idea was mine but I have to give thanks to Pinterest where I had seen several similar ones!

 

 

I also made up a pile of paper pom-poms (thanks again, Pinterest). We hung some of these up around the room and used the others as table decorations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were able to decorate the room at the hotel where the birthday dinner was going to be.

 

 

One of the decorations we had was a line of old photos of my dad from various decades.

 

 

 

 

 

While going through the old photos I found enough to make up a scrapbook of photos, which we gave to my dad at his dinner. The writing on the cover is made from some nice felt letters I found in Hobbycraft.

 

 

 

On the right hand side of the photo above is a pile of envelopes tied together. This was a project idea that my brother's wife suggested. She had seen it on a blog, where someone gave their dad 60 memories for his 60th birthday. We knew we wouldn't be able to get 60 memories together as she only suggested it a week before his birthday but, after getting some names from my mum, and me spending a morning sending out emails, we were able to get memories from people who have known my dad from different times in his life - from childhood, through his college days to today. The boys and my nephews all wrote or drew something as well. Each memory/picture was printed out and placed in an individual envelope so it took my dad a wee while to open them all!

 

 

The boys' present to him was a decoupage one. The Gaelic for grandad is Seanair (Shen-ar) which is almost always abbreviated to Shen.

 

 

 

Calum and David worked on the decoupage, which was a little bit fiddly in places, but the result was worth it.

 

 

 

 

 

And the final make, again by Calum and James, was the birthday cake.

 

 

 

 

 

Calum baked a gluten & dairy free '6' and I baked a non free from '0' and then we left James to do the decor.

 

 

 

 

He spent a couple of hours on it.

 

 

 

 

My dad likes golf and so this is James' icing version of him on the golf course.

 

 

 

 

The photos were taken while the icing was still soft which is why he is held up with a cocktail stick!

 

 

 

 

 

 

He made the bunker out of cake crumbs...

 

 

 

 

...and he said the extra golf balls are the ones that Shen has missed!

 

You can also see where James' name comes from!

 

 

We managed to keep my dad out of the kitchen while James was busy on the cake so he didn't see it until he was presented with it after the meal.

 

He had one more surprise when he cut into the cake.

 

The reason I made the '0' non free from was because we filled the middle with m and ms!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have a few more fun photos of the day to share but I think that's enough photos for one post!

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