60th Surprise Party

For my mom's 60th birthday we wanted to throw a surprise party for her. She is such a loving, kind woman who has been through a lot over the past couple years and she deserves it. Planning this party was fun, but difficult. I had to sneak her address book away for a day in order to get her friend's contact information. A lot of people are on Facebook these days, but not everyone. Keeping it a secret was so hard because I was so excited and just wanted to tell her! Overall, it was a huge success with people who came from Wisconsin, Michigan & Kansas and all over Colorado. There was not as much DIY at this party as I would have liked, but it turned out great! Check out the party below.

The gold 6-0 balloons are reusable balloons from Hobby Lobby! I had never heard of reusable balloons before, have you? You basically blow them up like you would a regular balloon and then you just deflate them for another party down the road. How cool is that?! The material is almost like those foil balloons and are pretty durable. My daughter was turning 6 the next summer so I reused the number 6 at her party. Perfect!

I ordered these photo booth props off Amazon. They were great! They were pretty inexpensive, under $10, with minimum assembly required.

I had purchased some 60th decorations from Party City just to make things a little easier this time. I scrounged up some old photos of my mom when she was a little girl all the way through high school and college and hung them all over this wall. I think the guests really loved looking at old photos of her.

I purchased this PDF download off Etsy and printed it off as a poster from Office Depot. Their poster prints are fairly reasonable. I glued the poster paper to a thick poster board to make it more sturdy. I had this propped up on display at the gift table. This was such a fun poster for guests to read through as they were waiting for the guest of honor to arrive. 

I had also created a guestbook on Shutterfly. I used current photos of her in the guestbook because I had already intended the old photos decor on the wall. I didn't really get a good picture of the guest book, but here is a couple pics of people signing it. 

I cut this cake topper out of glittery cardstock from Joann's. They sell single sheets of cardstock near the scrapbooking aisles. This would be super easy if you had a die cutting machine which I did not at the time, so I basically hand wrote the word "sixty" before cutting it out. This was very time consuming obviously, but there are people that sell cake toppers on Etsy that you could check out! My awesome hubby made the cake. 

This was by far my favorite part of the whole party. I found this idea off Pinterest. About a month before the party I had emailed all of the guests, or at least everyone that I had an email address for, and asked them to write a story or memory they have of my mom. It could be funny, nostalgic, short, long, whatever they wanted to write! I had them email me their letters and I compiled them into a document on my Mac. This is the cover I designed for the book. After I had everyone's letters, I went to Office Depot and had them bind the book. Then I wrapped it up and we gave it to her at her party as a gift. She cried reading through some of the memories that people had of her. It was so special! 

And a few photos from the party. You can really see the surprised look on her face! Haha. We got her good!

And that was the party! Happy 60th mom!