Disclaimer: I am not a crafty mom. I am not a Pinterest mom. But I am a mom who gets suckered into throwing her kids a birthday party every year with some kind of theme.  EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. But I can’t complain, it is fun, especially when I see the end result and I think to myself: “maybe I AM a crafty mom!” We all have our dreams.

So this past October for my girl’s champagne birthday I threw her a party Champagne Papi style. I think she liked it, but with tweens ya’ never really know. But I am convinced it earned me my cool mom badge. Here’s the breakdown:

Cupcake Toppers: My not so secret trick when hosting birthday parties for my kids is to do cupcakes instead of a cake. It saves me from having to cut the cake and even from using plates and forks. Plus the kids just want to eat the icing anyways right? So I always look for cupcake toppers that are easy to decorate in the chosen theme. For this year’s Drake theme I found these toppers from Etsy. They come as a downloadable file which I printed in colour onto cardstock, then I got really craft folks. I cut them out and taped them to toothpicks. Super crafty right? I should really have a YouTube channel for all this.

Decorations: I got a even more creative and made some signs using Canva referencing Drake’s famous lines and album titles. I printed them out onto card stock and then just glued some sticks that I found from the dollar store and voila – the kids didn’t use them for photo-ops but oh well.
I wanted to keep the colour theme light and cheery and age appropriate and I also didn’t want to do much work (hey, I’m honest!), so I ordered this set from Amazon. The colour theme means that I can reuse them again.
Banner: I wish I could say that I have an online template for you for this birthday banner, but sadly I don’t. But the good news! I do have a cheap(ish) and cheerful hack for making one. I bought a set of gold letters from Michaels (these ones are similar). I was going to trace them out to make the banner, but who has time (or patience) for that! So I hole punched the letters and strung them together with some string to spell out the sign. 


Loot Bags: Simple hack: I bought some gold paper loot bags and just glued one of the cupcake toppers that I printed out on them. Effective and EASY (ok and maybe a little lazy, but whatever.  Why you gotta fight with me at cheesecake huh?)

Other touches: You can create you own invitations on Canva or order these on Etsy. Adding some gold and black balloons are an easy touch, as well as bottle of sparkling cider to substitute for champagne and maybe a label saying ‘Champagne Papi.” My tween nixed that idea because it was too lame. But I’m not judging (it was the tween, she was judging.)