Surprise Party!

I couldn't blog about the surprise party I was planning for my cousin (the same cousin I planned the pink and orange party for two weekends ago) because she sometimes reads my blog. Because I'm not friends with a lot of her friends, I decided that it would be perfect to host the party at a restaurant/bar in St. Paul. I invited some of our family (my siblings, her parents, brother, more of our cousins, etc.) and figured that would also be a good location since no one would have to worry about paying for parking and it was more central than a restaurant in downtown Minneapolis.

Anyway, her favorite color is purple... and I'm LOVING dark purple with green right now, so I chose that as the color scheme. I didn't plan on doing anything too extravagant with the decorating, since it was at a restaurant and I didn't know how much I could do, so I choose to create an elegant centerpiece with some smaller centerpieces. In addition, I made some cupcakes and brought in some candy to put in some green-tinted martini glasses. I was going to do a favor for each guest, but couldn't really decide what a good one would be since most of us planned on going out afterward. I didn't want people to have to carry anything around with them. I looked for green or purple colored mints, but couldn't find any. Bummer.

The party turned out pretty good - I was really pleased with the way the decor turned out. I love how most of it was from the dollar store (the green tinted martini glasses, the small square vases, cylinder vases, river rocks and fake flower petals), TJMaxx (the purple cake stand and tall square vase) and HomeGoods (other cake stand). What I was quite disappointed with was the turn-out, however. I sent the invite out on Facebook so that her other friends could invite other friends I didn't know (and because I didn't want to send out invites by mail to people I didn't know), and 23 responded they were attending, with another 20 possibly attending. 11 people showed up. And the majority of those people were our family members. Oye. Oh well I guess!

Here's a look at how the party came together...

Here's the invite I created for the Surprise Party.

Here's a view of the whole table scape. The tall square vase and two cylinder vases were filled with water, along with black river rocks on the bottom, fake purple flower petals and floating candles. The smaller square vases are filled with black river rocks and green candles.

Here is a close up for the main centerpiece. The small vases had purple ribbon tied around them to correspond with the green candles, and the large vase had the green ribbon to correspond with the floating purple flowers. Initially, this centerpiece was suppose to be placed on the table where my cousin was sitting, but I thought it would take up too much room and get in the way of dinner and conversation. So it was placed on the dessert table.

Here's a closer look at the cylinder vases (these were suppose to be on separate tables from the main centerpiece, but since that ended up moving to dessert table, I placed the cylinders there too... just at the table ends. These are also the cupcakes I made! I dyed the vanilla frosting purple and had cute green present cupcake liners.

A closer look at the cupcakes and cupcake toppers I made for the event. The ones with the purple backing said "Happy Birthday" and the ones with the green backing said "Chelsie's 25th"

The other side of the table. The cupcake stand on this side is dark purple - I bought it from TJMaxx on clearance for $5! The green-tinted martini glasses were filled with green jelly beans (not shown in this photo) and Good n Plenty's.

Another view. Here you can see the green jelly beans in the other martini glass.

Well I hope you enjoyed viewing this as much as I enjoyed putting it together!