Party Decor

A couple of ideas we used for a church party this past weekend.

Some of the table centerpieces were these winter trees. You make them by stripping the leaves off good-sized branches, then pot them using fast-drying plaster of paris. Then we randomly hot-glued a few red berries on. My neighbor (and friend) had the brilliant idea of using some plaster to add "snow" to some of the branches. They turned out way cuter than the pictures show. I waited too late in the afternoon to take them.

These are especially cute to do in the spring time, using silk flower buds instead of berries and snow.





This other idea came from Lowes and you can find the instructions here. We did the snowflake that they did, but then we went crazy and did several more. I'm not gonna lie, these are time-consuming so I don't recommend waiting until the last 5 days before your party to make them. If you are an artist they'll go much faster. It just took a long time to plan out the shape and make patterns on butcher paper. We loved the result though, so it was all worth it! ☺

Here are a few.







Jen, you can no longer pretend you're not crafty. The secret is out!! ☺

Aloha!

Our church had a luau this past weekend and using some of Jill's brilliant ideas, we had some cool decorations.
Here are a couple of simple things we did.

I think this is originally a Martha Stewart idea. We took regular white Christmas lights and put a silk hibiscus flower over each light on the strand. The flowers were actually petals from lei's purchased from Walmart. They worked perfectly because they already had holes in the center of them just big enough to stretch over the light bulb. Otherwise we would have had to punch holes in the centers of about 600 flowers.


You could use this idea for many different themes. Weddings,
birthdays, etc. They look so pretty all lit up.
I forgot to take pictures of them hanging up at the luau
so here they are on my driveway. ☺


Jill has access to bamboo growing on some property she owns. We chain-sawed some down and then used a miter saw to cut them into varying heights and then tied hemp cord around each one and used them as centerpieces.
They turned out really cute.


I didn't know this until I saw it but each line or ridge on a bamboo pole is like a built-in shelf on the inside.
This made it easy to fill with white sand and a tea light.
I forgot to take pictures of these by themselves at the luau too, but you can sort of see it here. The tea lights were pushed down into the sand more on most of the centerpieces.


Plenty of summer left for a luau! ☺