Happy Friday everyone! We’ve have had a pretty miserable week over here with stomach bug bringing us all down. I have doused the house with Lysol and done copious amounts of laundry while sick myself. It isn’t easy being mom! Am laying in bed w kiddos and found these photos of the beautiful birthday dinner party we hosted awhile back. Hope you enjoy!
My favorite part of any party planning is decor and flowers. I love coming up with a color scheme, envisioning the ambiance I want to create and then shopping for beautiful flowers. Costco, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are my go to places for buying flowers. This centerpiece was created mostly by what was blooming in the garden at that time. It smelled heavenly thanks to the yellow David Austin roses.
I made smaller arrangements in silver mint julep cups using the roses and alstroemeria. Say alstroemeria 5x fast! Alstroemeria or lily of the Incas is one of my favorite flowers, it’s inexpensive, comes in a variety of colors and lasts forever.
I also needed place cards since there were 10 of us and I wanted to separate the couples. Do you do that at your dinner parties? It is SO hard to figure out who sit next to who, I mean yes introvert next to an extrovert and all that but still, so hard to place people. And then one of my extroverts couldn’t make it throwing my whole seating chart off! Since the dinner party took place in the fall, I made place card holders out of acorns, I took a small serrated knife and cut slits into the nut. The darn acorns were not cooperating, the cup (or cupule) came off the top so I had to use my trusty hot glue gun to glue it back . I think my husband thought I was losing it. 🙂
Our dining room table accommodates 8, so we pushed together 2 plastic craft tables in the kitchen, covered them with inexpensive white polyester tablecloths ( find them in all colors here) and used my beautiful lucite dinner chairs. I saw them first at the blog The Enchanted Home and was obsessed. You can see Tina’s post here.
I was surprised my hubby liked them as much as I did and we’ve already used these several times.
I used gold chargers from Michaels, purple dinner plates with gold rim, flatware was from Horchow’s sale (to my horror we only had 8 settings, so I just mixed some plain ones in, oh well) and soup bowls were Limoges china.
In the end, when all the candles were lit, I loved the outcome. The dinner party was special and festive and I loved the overall ambiance. Even the acorns were put to good use when one guest, a former Girl Scout, demonstrated how to blow into an acorn to call for help in an emergency. It made a really loud sound!
Love
-h
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