You Say It's Your Birthday...

All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much - George Harrison

My mother in law likes to celebrate all things (one of the many things I love about her) and her 60th birthday was not exception!  She 'hired' me to throw her a surprise party so I dreamed up a fun 'Beatles Bash' for her!  The MIL is slightly obsessed with the Beatles so it was great they could help celebrate her special day with friends and family.  I started with creating a custom party 'logo' to use on the invite, party decor, and favors.  In the traditional Fab Four font it featured 'The Birthday'.

Another element I wanted throughout the party was color, so I chose black and white with pops of yellow to reinforce the mod 60's Beatles theme.  Everything from linens to balloons to flowers to records to cupcakes carried the colors.  The flowers were a special touch, handmade paper flowers using Beatles sheet music.  Simply download and print previews of any sheet music and punch out with the largest scalloped paper punch you can find, then layer and fold with a solid color.  Add a smaller punch out or fringe for the flower center.

Guests had a great time eating yummy food, dancing to Beatles tunes, toasting the guest of honor with a signature cocktail, and taking photo ops with their favorite Beatle.  Thanks to the internet, I found life size cut outs and used an instant camera to encourage guests to ham it up!  For the real fans there were song references in all the signage, vintage button pins, and album cover playing cards for favors.  To prove that my MIL is a true #1 fan, we photoshopped her into classic paparazzi shots of the British invasion and posted them around the room.

Thanks to all of the family, friends, and the Beatles for making my MIL so happy on her special day!  Special thanks to my dear friend and talented photographer Joan Tsen of Applesky Photography for all photos!!

Fiesta!

A good friend was hitting a milestone, so while he was at it, why not hit a piñata too!!  We enjoyed throwing a colorful fiesta in our back patio, grilling up fish and chicken tacos and clinking cold cervesas and mexican sodas!  To dress up the patio, I made a few traditional tissue paper flowers and hung some traditional tissue paper garlands.

 As a surprise for the birthday boy who is nicknamed 'Beard' I customized a classic game into 'pin the beard on the donkey'!  I think he was touched.  Everyone had a great time… except maybe the poor piñata!

We're All Mad Here!

No matter what age you are celebrating, a party can make you feel like a kid again.  For a good friend's 40th birthday we took a trip down the rabbit hole and threw a Wonderland Party!  We took over half the house and the whole backyard to feature different vignettes and activities from the Wonderland story including, the Queen's Rose Garden, the Caterpillar's Den, the Pool of Tears, and the Mad Hatter's Tea Party! Feathers, flowers, and flamingos anything goes in Wonderland!  Each area was over the top as only Wonderland can be but was kept cohesive with distinct colors and motifs from blank and white with cards and hearts for the Queen, green and purple with mushrooms and flowers for the Caterpillar, to pastels and teapots for the Mad Hatter.  And of course the big Cheshire Cat was mounted in a tree to keep watch over it all!

 

As guests arrived they walked passed over-sized cards and their handywork of painting the roses red!  I took white paper flowers, dabbed red paint on them and stuck them in the bushes lining the walkway.

In the 'This Way' 'That Way' world of Wonderland, signage was important.  Festive black and white signs helped guide guests from the entrance and throughout the party.

Guests were encouraged to wear Wonderland inspired costumes and a photobooth was set up to capture everyone in their tea party finest!  Games and tasty treats were everywhere for guests to enjoy and reinforced the playful mood.  Chess and checker boards were spray painted directly onto the lawn and croquet was set up with lawn flamingos looking on.

Leave No Milestone Left Unturned

A garden brings life and beauty to the table. - Alice Waters (via Talula's Garden)

This past weekend I had the honor of hosting a milestone birthday celebration for one of my best girlfriends!  The birthday girl chose the venue and then tossed the reins over to myself and another co-conspirator to run with it.  We were immediately inspired by the farm to table menu and cozy atmosphere at Talula's Garden in Philadelphia!

After deciding to incorporate floral elements, we developed a modern palette of lilac, peach, and crimson with golden highlights to pop against the weathered garden setting.  I wanted to create some party elements while keeping it simple since we would be in a restaurant and not have a lot of room on the communal table or a lot of time prior to our seating to set up...

The solution was bright tissue paper flowers wrapped around colorful 'seed bombs' in gold flower pots that performed double duty as table decoration and party favor... and with the swipe of a paint marker could have served as placecards too!  Similar instructions can be found from Martha Stewart.  The whole table was visually tied together with a roll of gold web ribbon and pre-made dimensional flower stickers running down the center.

As pretty as the party table turned out, we still needed to highlight that this was no ordinary birthday - this was the big 3-0!  So, taking more cues from the garden setting, I created a pair of 3-0 topiaries out of styrofoam wreaths (dollar store!!) and adhesive backed sheet moss.  I modified one of the wreaths into a three with some strategic cuts and toothpicks to hold it all back together.  I spray painted some dowels with the same gold paint used on the flower pots and inserted them into the wreaths and a block of styrofoam in a flower pot. (psst! would make great table numbers too!)  Lastly, I added some more moss and fairy critters to the base and some ribbons in the party colors to the topiary stem!

The Birthday Girl has a soft spot for all things magical!

Another way to celebrate my friend's special birthday, we displayed some photos of her as a baby and growing up!  Some were framed in gold frames while others with coordinating lilac and crimson floral scrapbooking papers and they were all tucked in amongst the restaurants existing display of found objects. 

Both the guest of honor and all of the guests got a kick out of seeing the birthday girl on the day she was born, her 1st birthday, her college graduation day, her wedding day, etc. which made a great conversation starter!  We all had a great time and great food - including the birthday girl's favorite: donuts and s'mores!

Cheers to Another Year!

"Every year on your birthday, you get a chance to start new."  ~  Sammy Hagar

For my birthday celebrations this year, I decided to scale back the fanfare from the last few years and planned an intimate dinner party with a small group of my oldest friends.  I noticed as I've gotten older I truly enjoy small scale gatherings where you can really get into the conversation and soak up the moment!

Locked Up!

Small does not have to mean boring though - so I reserved a cozy and unique private dining room at an excellent seafood restaurant, Fish Urban Dining, in the ever evolving Asbury Park, NJ.  The building is an old Post Office and we had the pleasure of dining in the former Vault!  The space proved the perfect setting for lingering over good food, wine, and friends.

Cheers!

Since I can't resist adding extra festive touches to things, I crafted a "Happy Birthday!" Banner from vintage post card scrapbook paper and vinyl letters.  As a surprise for my guests, there was a party favor at each place setting which doubled as a place card.  For the favor tags, I used the same vintage paper from the banner and tied them to Voluspa candles for the ladies and Oliveros cigars for the gentlemen.

Favor Tags/ Place cards

Tip: Use favor tags as an easy tool for creating a seating chart... prior to tying to the gifts, lay them out on a table so you can arrange and re-arrange until you like the layout, then snap a picture.  Reference the picture when you get to the venue for placing the favors/ place cards at each seat.  For this party I chose a traditional set up by seating couples across from each other and alternating genders next to each other, with the host/ hostess at either end of the table.

Boogie Man

Put on your boogie shoes...

Milestone birthday's call for milestone parties... so for a family member's 40th birthday we surprised him with a party straight out of the decade he was born in - the 70's! I researched all the fun found in the 70's and came up with some great ways to transform the hostess's house into a groovy love lounge!

Fondue dinner parties were huge in the 70's and the perfect way to get the family together. The hostess went all out with 3 different courses - cheese for appetizers, oil for entree meats, and chocolate for dessert!  Pre-cutting up all the bite size pieces for dipping and borrowing fondue pots from family members made switching up the courses easy.

Framing the entrance to the dining area were funky beaded curtains. Since the tables would be crowded with fondue accoutrements, centerpieces had to go up - as in hanging psychedelic lanterns from the ceiling centered above each table. At each place setting was a toy kaleidoscope to add to the trippy fun! Throughout the house we hung printouts of classic 70's movie and TV show posters like King Kong and Starsky and Hutch.  Playing on the TV throughout the night were 70's episodes of Charlie's Angels and scenes from Saturday Night Fever!

Speaking of Saturday Night Fever, what's dinner without some dancing? So the living room was converted into a disco complete with spinning disco ball and flower power garlands radiating outward from it. To add to the lounge vibe, the couches were dressed up with colorful fuzzy pillows and throws.

Let Them Eat Cookies

This year I celebrated my birthday with a fabulous brunch followed by a rooftop bar hop! For the brunch, I mixed up my guests a bit with the use of fun place cards. I printed each guests name on a strip of stiff paper, folded them in half, cut the ends to look like a flag and tacked them together with a small bit of glue. I opened up multicolored cocktail umbrellas, threaded them through the flags and poked each of them into a ripe clementine. They were easy and really brightened up the table without cluttering it with flowers or any other type of centerpiece, plus they were a great treat at the end of the meal!

Ok maybe the birthday girl was the centerpiece! ;)


And forget cake... we enjoyed adorable cookies from Eleni's NYC! They ship anywhere!

Roaring 20's

You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone. - Al Capone

A bunch of us recently threw one of our best friend's a 30th birthday party in homage to her Roaring 20's! We had a great time researching one of the best decades ever and turning one of our houses into a retro Speakeasy! Invites included 20's slang and the Speakeasy password!

The spring off point was a vintage photo of a 1920's party decorated in streamers which we replicated in the dining room! We kept a simple black/ white/ silver theme running throughout all the little touches including feathers, flowers and fringe curtains. Other fun accents included squirt guns lying about and fake bullet holes in the walls... but of course we posted a sign "All Firearms Must Be Checked At The Door"! However, the best decoration of all was everyone's fabulous costumes including flappers, bootleggers and gangsters! And with a bit of photoshop, a friend made an Al Capone style "Wanted" poster featuring the birthday girl as the outlaw of the hour!

Lots of research went into the appetizers for this party. Aside from the requisite "Bathtub Gin", "Hooch", and "Giggle Water"... we served up some treats either invented or made popular in the 1920's including:

• Peanut Butter & Jam Sandwiches
• Pineapple Upside Down Cake
• Jell-o
  
• Ice Cream Sandwiches
• Charleston Chews, Milk Duds, Gummi Bears, Twizzlers, Babe Ruth Bars, Reese's PB Cups

One of the hostess's got crafty and made fun food picks out of vintage head shots of 1920's party goers wishing a Happy Birthday!

Also, a friend whipped up some chocolate covered pretzel rod "cigarettes and cigars" featured on silver trays at 1920's prices.

With everyone dressed up it was a great excuse to set up a photo booth! We hung some fabric and hired a friend to snap goofy photos of the guests using props like an inflatable saxophone, a chalkboard, sparkly glasses, boas, and the most popular: homemade felt mustaches glued on dowel handles. Everyone (including me of course) hammed it up and loved it!

Sassy Soiree

Birthdays she believed, were no time to exercise restraint. - Ann Taintor

One of my best friends is a real firecracker, so when my girlfriends and I were hosting a birthday party for her, we were inspired by artist Ann Taintor and her retro women with their sassy thoughts! What’s more retro than the clinking of glasses and the sampling of treats at a home-spun cocktail dinner party?  We decided to incorporate Ann Taintor’s style into the décor but with a personalized twist: we would make posters featuring our best friend’s picture in place of the 40’s women! Through Adobe Photoshop, one of my fellow hostesses was able to doctor up the photos to make them look more like retro illustrations and we matched them with A.T.’s funny quotes that reminded us of our feisty best friend!

To help my apartment look even more festive, I wanted to craft something with very little effort and a lot of impact. After Googling vintage party images, I re-discovered paper chains! I flipped through my stack of outdated magazines and picked out the most color saturated advertisements and articles. A few hundred recycled strips and staples later, and it looked like a party!

We knew we wanted to serve our guests dinner, but we also wanted to maintain the cocktail party vibe. So we scaled down some classic dinner foods and combined them with retro hors d’ oeuvres! A major source of recipes and ideas was http://www.epicurious.com/ which features great menus and a wide range of recipes for all skill levels and tastes. Another factor for us to consider in our menu selection was that this party would be on a chilly fall evening so we wanted to provide hearty fare as well as seasonal produce. One of my other fellow hostesses combined all of these ideas into one fantastic menu: We served Mac & Cheese Cupcakes, Swedish Meatballs with Cranberry Compote, Velveeta Salsa Dip, Spinach Onion Dip, Deviled Eggs and a delicious Fall Harvest Salad with a variety of apples, pears, grapes, pomegranate seeds, sunflower seeds, and walnuts! When serving up our feast we used lots of crock pots and pretty dishes. We also provided fun (pom-poms!) cocktail picks and Ann Taintor cocktail napkins for an added retro cocktail flair!


One of my favorite things to do is create a Signature Cocktail for parties. This one was inspired by both the retro theme and the Fall Harvest menu. I modified Martha Stewart’s recipe and combined 1 part chilled Sparkling Apple Cider, 1 part chilled Pear Nectar and 1 part Spiced Rum. An apothecary jar with some ice provided the perfect dispenser! For how to set up the perfect party ready bar, check out this past post: Raise the Bar For extra fun, I picked up some old time hard candies that reminded me of the ones my Grandmother always had out and filled up a vintage candy jar (garage sale find!) for guests to enjoy!

Party Shoes

Give a girl the correct footwear and she can conquer the world - Bette Midler

One of my good friend’s birthdays was coming up and I wanted to make the affair extra special. Meanwhile, my friend was super excited for her birthday and told me all about the perfect pair of shoes she had treated herself to in honor of the occasion. The fabulous birthday shoes were hot pink with tiny purple polka dots and inspired birthday drinks and desserts infused with pink, purple, and high style!


Sweet treats really indulged in the party colors! We kept it simple with colored M&Ms but got a little fancy with chocolate covered strawberries dressed up in pink and purples. One of our friends whipped up “confetti” cupcakes iced in pinks and purples and topped off with the perfect pink high heels and purses picks from online baking supplier Fancy Flours. (Hint: confetti cupcakes are created by throwing jimmies into any white cake batter before baking – we chose pink and purple ones of course!)

The birthday girl deserved her very own Signature Cocktail, and if it coordinated with her shoes, so much the better!  I mixed up a batch of “Stilettopolitans” in a glass pitcher and poured it into glasses rimmed in purple sugar.

Cocktail Recipe:

Mix 4 parts cranberry raspberry juice, 2 parts premium vodka, 1 part amaretto and add sliced limes. Swipe lime slice along glass rim and gently twist glass upside down in sugar on a small plate, fill with cocktail and enjoy!