It’s birthday time again!! B turned 34 last week, and I tried very hard to make his birthday as special as he made mine. I think I did fairly well, if judging by the look on his face when he found all my surprises. Needless to say, I’m a little better at surprising him than he is me. But instead of admitting this, he blames me for being intuitive. What can a girl do?

Disclaimer: I didn’t come up with this hat banner on my own. I searched Pinterest for a while looking for adult birthday surprise ideas, and really came up empty handed. Then I saw this cute little birthday face banner, (you can find it here: From Dahlias To Doxies), made with different faces of the same baby from the previous year. Well, I could turn this into an adult surprise! Especially because my husband is notorious for making funny photos in our pictures (the duck face is questionable?!).

The blog above gives much better instructions, but I’ll give it a quick overview. Visit her blog to see her banner and for detailed instructions.

1. Gather the photos (on the computer) that you want to use.

2. Open Microsoft Word, insert ALL photos into the document. I also changed my margins to be “narrow,” but you don’t have to do this if you’re not sure how. Tip: Top tool bar, open “Page Layout.” Click on “Margins” and select the “Narrow” option.

3. Use the photo editor to crop all photos down to just the face.

4. I pulled corners of photos to make them all roughly the same size. They won’t all be exactly the same size, but it doesn’t matter.

5. Print in black & white for good effect.

To make the hats, I just cut random triangle sizes out of 12×12 scrapbook paper pages. Then I glue-sticked (yeah I just made that a word) them to the top of B’s heads. I just used crepe paper, two layers, cut the fringe into each side, glued to the hat, and fluffed for effect! I used curling ribbon, taped each head to the back, and strung it all together.  I added a little extra ribbon to each end so it looked a little better (and printed off his name beneath), and it turned out super cute!