A Memorable Milestone: Celebrating a 60th Birthday
We recently had the pleasure of being the host location for Chris' Dad's surprise 60th Birthday Party. We were tasked with decor, so I went online for some inspiration. Admittedly, I didn't find a ton of ideas out there specific to milestone birthdays, but got a few good ideas for displaying photos and highlighting the year his Dad was born.
One of the ideas, I really liked was hanging pictures from balloons over the food table. Chris had a bunch of family photos from over the years and I thought it would be fun to display them in some way.
Source: weddingchicks.com
Looking back, I wish I had experimented with this idea prior to the day of the party. We printed the photos at Target and I had some cardstock ready to mount the photos on. I got balloons at Party City and thought I was all set to do. When we started attaching the photos to the balloons, they began weighing down the balloons. We quickly ditched the cardstock to help with the weight, but in some cases it still didn't seem to work. Unfortunately, this inspirational post didn't have any instructions along with it. My recommendation is to play around with it a bit and consider printing color photos on lighter computer paper. Despite the setbacks, we did get some of the photos up and guests really got a kick out of looking at them:
I assembled the rest of the remaining photos into a picture collage on the table. Inspiration for something similar can be found here.
The next idea I liked was somehow highlighting some of the world happenings and prices of things the year that Chris's Dad was born. Unfortunately, I did not find any kind of free printable option, so I looked at some of the designs out there and decided I could make my own! Using PowerPoint, different fonts, and some clipart, I came up with this:
Here is a link to the PowerPoint file if you'd like to modifying it for your own party! I recommend converting it to a PDF before printing. Because I did it in PowerPoint it was not high enough quality to get a large poster made, but it printed fine on an 8 1/2 x 11 document. We displayed two copies in frames for decor.
We also created a DIY photobooth for the party ("how to" post on this to come on the blog!) and ordered these downloadable 60th Birthday party props from Etsy. The shop also carries them for other milestone birthdays.
We printed them on cardstock, cut them out and attached them to sticks. It was a fun addition to the party.
It was a great night of family, friends, and celebrating Chris's Dad!