Monday, May 20, 2013

Luau inspiration

I wanted to stop in and show off a little.  My husband asked me to do the decorations for his boss' retirement party.  It was to be a Luau for a group of mostly men and their wives.  My husband kept telling me that it was a "guy's party" - I think that meant no fufu ;) There was 150 originally expected, although the numbers ended up being around 110.
I searched the web, having an idea of what I wanted and gathered pictures on Pinterest.  I wanted to stay away from plastic lobsters and like.  I was looking to make it look more like being on the islands.
Here is what I came up with.




What do you think?  I got lots of compliments that night.  Even from the servers, who stopped me to say that they looked better than many floral arrangements they had seen there.  I was even asked if I did this for a living.  I guess that is a pretty good compliment!  

Details?  The Birds of Paradise were silk bought on-line for about $3-4/each.  The tropical leaves were found via ebay.  The tabletop Tiki torches were from Oriental Trading ($6.50/2) as were the leis (about $65).  I also bought all fresh fruit - pineapple, coconuts, bananas, mango, papaya, kiwi, lemon and limes.  The fruit ended up being just under $100 (about $7 per table) if you are looking to replicate this in your backyard.  The big flowers were found at JoAnn on sale for about $4 for a huge bunch of 7 hibiscus.  Also, at JoAnn's were extra Birds of Paradise at about $6/each, on sale buy 1, get 1 50% off.  I borrowed the shells from my Aunt Becky since she had done a luau herself.  The total for 15-20 tables was about $350.  Some of the cost was due to buying for the higher original number.  I later saw the torches at a local party store for $2-2.50 each.  It was such a striking table and mostly edible - saw many guests nibbling away!



Tuesday, May 14, 2013

I've been scrappin'

The last month has flown by faster than most!  I could not believe that it was 6 weeks ago that I learned that I would be a guest Creative Team member for OScraps, while still doing my converting for M&M Designs.  I figured that was pretty perfect - I could use the templates for one and the items from the other.  Needless to say, I have been completing a lot of pages!










I am going to keep scrapbooking!