Janie's Rainy Day Garden Party
Janie is a lover of nature and decided months ago that she wanted to celebrate her birthday with an outdoor flower party. Our community is still being very Covid cautious so the idea to be outdoors felt like a great choice to be able to invite a few friends from school to celebrate. Unfortunately, as the date of the party rolled nearer, we realized rain could be an issue and decided to plan for a tent party. Once the tent element was decided, we decided to really play it up with lots of balloons, fringe and a flower chandelier all hanging from the ceiling. When we set it up and Janie came down to check it out, she lit up to see how much we were able to transform the backyard!
It did rain during the party, but not a ton. We opted to only put a few of the sidewalls on the 10 x 20 tent to allow for ventilation. Guests were encouraged to bring jackets and we offered a bin of cozy blankets for them to us while they had the tea party. For a day in early October, it worked out well. I also liked that it allowed the group of eleven year old girls to have a bit of privacy and independence in the tent at the party.
I loved adding the fringe elements in with the balloons to make the tent ceiling a feature. I also added an old paper flower chandelier from PB Kids that hung in my daughters room years ago directly over the center of the table.
The disposable tableware is from Meri Meri, which is one of our very favorite creators or absolutely adorable themed party products. Unfortunately, these napkins and plates are from previous collections and can’t be purchase from them directly but can be found at secondary retailers, like Etsy vendors. The blush water goblets were part of the Pioneer Woman Collection and the blush & gold plastic silverware is an Amazon find.
I love working with the faux foam flower. They photography with a realistic matte, come in many lovely colors, can be reused and are made with a wired stem making them easy to turn into something like these colorful rose garland. With this installation, we added a peony style to the roses and pom dahlia, and attached them to a eucalyptus faux garland.
The party ended up only having 4 guests so each girl was able to feast on the dessert buffet that contained mini cupcakes, macaroons, candies and lots of varieties of cookies. Janie made some of her own to share, but mainly they are all store bought options, but placed on footed cake stands with doilies, they look fitting of a garden party.
I added the foam flowers to the mini eucalyptus plants for easy and reusable floral options. I like that these are colorful and sit low to the table. I put three on the table surrounding he tiered tea towers.
We set a balloon display outside the party tent, but on a side that didn’t have the sidewalls so the guests could enjoy them throughout the event. We just went with a lot of pastel colors, mainly Tuftex or Qualatex brand balloons. If you don’t keep a lot of balloons on hand, I would recommend purchasing a balloon garland kit that contains colors you are looking for. These brands of balloons are great to work with and have great color, but they get pricy to buy several colors and sizes of each. The vinyl used on the backdrop was cut with the Silhouette Cameo electronic cutting machine, which I have used for over 10 years now and it still works like a charm and is so much fun to use.
With the small group, we were able to set the table before guests arrived and make the details personalized. Each guest got had a place card that was created in Canva Pro along with a personalized journal and flower pen favors. Stickers were cut with the Silhouette Cameo electronic cutter and printed on Avery brand sticker label sheets. There was a trivia game at the party where the guests used their pens and journal. I found coordinating thank you tags on Etsy and was able to personalize them with Janie’s name.
The party guests got to create custom flower charm bracelets. We provided blank charm bracelets and then they selected the flower charms to customize their own. For eleven year old girls this was a fairly easy craft, but they seemed to really enjoy it and walk away with a cute fashion item. I made cute little boxes on my Silhouette electronic cutter that I embellished with name stickers to for them to keep the bracelets in.