When Yasmin was born my sister and brother in law fell in love with a pink stuffed fluffy flamingo and hoped that would be her comforter, but she soon decided that a little monkey was going to be her stuffed pal for life! 

However, the flamingo theme was well and truly set for her joint first birthday and Christening party and she loved it! A trip to Monkey World on her actual birthday meant we covered all bases!

It was such a pleasure helping to plan a pink party - with two boys I don't see a lot of pink balloons in this house! Stacy, the amazing creative talent behind Style My Party helped bring the theme to life with their new range of flamingo decorations and party accessories and we have had so much fun sourcing what feels like almost every flamingo party product on the planet!

My brother and sister in law flew back from America for just 48 hours armed with a suitcase full of goodies we found online in the US and my sister's house started to look like an enclosure at Bird World!

The vibrant colours made the hall look so cheerful and bright. Pool party colours of pinks and turquoise blue. 

I was overwhelmed by how much all the guests appreciated all the little details, the cupcake picks, the food labels, the DIY photo booth! All the effort over the little details was worth every late night and car load of party goodies. Everyone loved the 6ft tall card spinner full of photos from Yasmin's first year!

The games went down a storm with all the children and it meant all the adults could socialise with happy children!

If you are looking for flamingo themed games try these:

• Flamingo Hop - We laid out a piece of plastic on the floor my sister had left over from work, but you could use coloured tape to mark the start line instead. Everyone had to hop as far as they could - like the long jump then mark their name on the plastic. But you could add an extra bit of tape to write on which would look just as good. Style My Party created brilliant masks too! 
• Flamingo Golf - Plastic golf balls from Poundland and flamingo plastic grabbers from Bird World for clubs made the perfect mini golf! I recycled a piece of wipe clean tablecloth from Sammy's pet party 2 years ago and used 2 baskets, turned on their sides, from the boy's play room as the holes. I stuck a balloon and a flamingo through the handles of the basket and all the kids loved it. There were balls flying everywhere!
• Tissue paper flamingos - It's always good to have a quiet craft as a game at a party for children who may not want to join in the more physical activities. Plus they often occupy the children for longer! We drew an outline of a flamingo and scanned it into the computer, printed lots of copies and laid out pots of glue and brushes and coloured tissue paper. The children then scrunched little pieces to create a flamingo collage.
• Hook a flamingo - I seem to always manage to have a hook a duck at parties and even though it means you have to drag a paddling pool of water through a hall at clearing up time, they are always really popular. I found flamingo ducks online from Oriental Trading and we marked a few with a number 1 on the bottom. If you netted a number 1 duck you won a little packet of sweets. 

I would definitely recommend a DIY photobooth too. You capture such fun images and it only take a few people to go first for everyone else to join in the fun!

All I used were tinsel curtains which you can buy online or in most party shops. The are relatively cheap but have great impact! Raid your kids dressing up boxes for props and place a basket by the curtains so people can help themselves. My tip would be to hang two or three curtains if you want to create a wider booth or crop your photos tight afterwards in edit, so the curtain fills the background. 

The buffet table was decoration in itself and I tried to make all the food more interesting by displaying dishes in different plates and at different heights. I used upturned boxes, the kid's chairs and made a backdrop from a pink blanket! I used my photography backdrop frame and used bulldog clips to secure the blanket. But you could make your own frame with garden plant pots for weights and garden canes for the frame.

The Style My Party tassel bunting and all the printed picks and food labels brought it all to life.

The cake from Creative Cakes by Vickie stole the show as the centre piece, but psst it was all polystyrene! A much cheaper way to have a beautiful cake and we had so much cake in the buffet it would have been wasted. It was still a luxury as it was professionally iced but it's a great idea for you to try at home! They cut the top tier of their wedding cake and we all sang happy birthday to a quite bemused little one year old who coped amazingly well with all the attention from 80 guests!

The birthday girl handed out her thank you cards in her new pram from Auntie, designed by Style My Party and we attached a pair of Flamingo glasses to each one!

I adored the huge balloons from Style My Party and the balloon tassels looked incredible. Be warned they do take an enormous amount of helium but they would look fabulous blown up with a pump and tied to walls or the ceiling. I bought the letter balloons from Bubblegum Balloons and they have little holes to enable you to string them up as bunting too. They made a great feature for the drinks table and we couldn't resist posing for a last photo of the day!

You will be able to buy all the printed products online at Style My Party very soon! Thank you for providing all the lovely bits for Yasmin which helped make the party such a success!

I have a love affair with props.

I love how they can add atmosphere to a photograph and tell a story. I am so happy when I am styling up a little photo for inspiration, lost in my own little world!

I have wanted to bring back my Sunday Prop Shop feature for a while, but my obsession with props is too great to restrict to a Sunday! So from now on I will be sharing my collections with you under #PropShop. Over the last few months it's been brilliant to see so many bloggers take a little more effort over their photos and style them in their own ways, with new backgrounds and colourful accessories. What are your go to props for photographs? I'd love to know!

When it comes to props I adore plates. Nothing makes me happier than a table of mis matched crockery and serving dishes, making a routine, mid week meal come alive. There is something about the pops of colour that just make the food taste nicer! All in the mind!

My collection of wonderful plates means I can create unique photography for food clients and I have curated a collection of different styles and eras to ensure I can style a vast range of imagery. I have banned myself from buying anymore blue and white china at the moment as I have enough to host a banquet with! But the temptation is hard to resist when I spy a plate for 50p at a charity shop!

My "props" have become part of our daily life and we use almost everything you see in this post on rotation. I never wanted to have a cupboard that looked like a sad returns department of a homeware store, I want to be surrounded by things that make me smile and inspire a creative idea.

I have lusted after a wooden plate rack for as long as I can remember so I was thrilled when I was sent this beautiful turquoise number from Out There Interiors. I can't wait to find a house to buy so it can adorn our new kitchen wall! Or I might be tempted to have it in my office - wouldn't it be wonderful for scrap book papers, well loved and saved magazines and my absolute favourite plates that inspire so many ideas?

The colour is so rich and at 100cm wide it can display a huge number of plates. Layer your smaller plates in front of dinner plates and really show off your lovely china.

I think the vibrant colour would refresh any kitchen and the distressed finish adds character and charm.

I am all for pops of colour so this would look brilliant with an all white display too.

It gave me the chance to show you some of my plates that I have collected over the years. 

I always search for metal chargers in charity shops and car boot sales. They make fab props because they have depth and texture but are not shiny! Remember - you don't want to see your reflection in a photograph!

Woods are excellent too - chopping boards make perfect backgrounds for small objects and I cannot resist picking up a wooden plate when I see one. The surfaces are often smooth but not too reflective and you can use them on crisp sheets of white paper or card for a clean look or take them outside on the garden bench for a more earthy and Autumnal feel. They are great for kids craft posts too as they can be used for your craft materials without the worry of smashing like china. 

Plastic can be fantastic too! Dig out your picnic plates and raid the kids melamine - they often have great prints which can add fun to a photo but be careful when shooting outside. On a sunny day plastic will show up big light patches so take your plate into the shade, in even light where the colours won't distort.

Paper plates are ideal props too and I was giddy when I opened these alphabet plates for Mother's Day. I use them all the time in my Instagram feed and paper plates are cheaper to buy than china. So save one from a next birthday party - I am sure it will inspire an idea.

I source a lot of my individual plates from charity shops. I head straight to the crockery section and more often than not I spot a bargain. I am currently hunting for the green cabbage leaf plates although they don't seen to come up that often. 

Platters are wonderful for big family meals. It might just be me, but bringing to the table a feast on a pretty platter just makes more of an occasion of meal times.

But these have to be my favourite. Quite a few of them were birthday and Christmas presents and although they could be saved for best, we don't, we use them everyday and get such lovely compliments from visitors. 

And if you fancy having a play with some of my props then make sure you get a ticket for Blog On on the 4th May 2014. Along with 3 other bloggers I will be hosting the props and styling part of the photography session and will be encouraging you all to create beautiful vignettes for your social media feeds as well as sharing lots of tips and advice for styling your blog photos at home. I'll be showing you my behind the scenes shots and let you into lots of my little secrets to get "studio" look photos at home. 

I will be bringing suitcases and apple crates full of all sorts of styles so there will be something for everyone to get creative with.

Plus we get to play! 

Do you suffer from plate love syndrome too? I'd love to see how you style your photos with lovely plates! 

I was kindly sent the plate rack from Out There Interiors and I love it.

I love being part of the contributing team of photography loving mothers over on I Heart Snapping.

And in case you've missed it, every Monday we all post a snap of our children as part of the Living Arrows series.

Weekly portraits are such a lovely memento of their little lives and what I enjoy most about this project is how it brings out everyone's creative side. That when you join in a weekly series, you don't always have to post a picture of their faces! 

It's all about what you have captured that week.

This week was week 16 and a nice point to post a quarterly review! 

I love how Wintry the early photos feel and how colour is creeping into my photos with the sunnier Spring weather.

I love that Ollie still looks small. Because he doesn't feel small. He's like a busy bruiser at the moment, even with his skinny little frame and chicken legs! He races around at a hundred miles an hour, is terribly clumsy and is streets ahead of Sammy at the same age.

We joke that Sammy was like a big baby at 2 and a half, but Ollie feels as though he's two going on 7! He loves lego and never ever puts it in his mouth, he hasn't eaten in a highchair for almost a year and today he told me off for helping him put his shoes on! He's so much more independent, which we attribute to having a bossy and strong willed older brother, but he's also so much more street wise all by himself.

He is just as contended to play on his own as with Sammy and can work his way around an iPad at a frightening speed.

I adore how Sammy acts in front of the camera. I won't lie, sometimes I do have to bribe them into a photo, to look less like crazy fools screaming cheese and making terrible grimaces and more of the natural fun loving boys we know.

I also won't lie and say I find this project easy. There have been some weeks when I have suddenly panicked that of all the hundreds of work images I have taken in a week that I haven't snapped a single one of the boys. But what I realised is that actually I take "Living Arrows" pictures all the time, just not necessarily on my DSLR.

And over the last 6 weeks or so I have grown even more fond of the camera in my pocket. 

At the end of the year I want to print a mini book of all the photos and it won't matter a jot if they are a mix of iPhone and "big camera" when they are printed small. It's easy to get into the mindset of trying to always take a perfect photo but sometimes it's the snapshots that capture all the little moments that bring back memories and sum up life as you know it.

So go forth and snap! And come and join in with us.