Wednesday, July 11, 2012

30.

Well, I hit a big milestone this year, the big old dirty thirty, eeeeeeeek!  Instead of getting all sad, depressed and wallowing in my older age, I thought eff it, go big or go home, I'm throwing a PARTAY!

With a little, ok, A LOT, of inspiration from Pinterest, the birthday planning began.  First I picked out colors, Pink... is one of my favorite colors and what goes great with pink, grey!  Colors check.  I started looking up 30th birthday's on Pinterest and didn't really see anything too inspiring.  What I did see a lot of, chevron stripes, and that's when I fell in love.

Next, I started looking for invitation ideas.
30th Invitation.
Having recently walked down the aisle, I knew how pricey invitations get so I wanted a DIY project.  Plus, my great friend Patty (she has a great blog) just taught me all about paper and ribbons and lot's of cool things you can do to make the ordinary look extraordinary.  I was basically on a paper making mission and found inspiration from Love vs. Design's "Zigzags" invitation theme!



Then, the real fun began.  Decorations, menu's and last but not least BEVERAGES!  I may have gone a little Pinterest crazy, I think my husband was ready to trade me in.  Every weekend I had a new project to work on, and every weekend he wondered what was wrong with me, ha ha!

Bar I and the Confetti Garland.

My first Pinterest project was to re-create Confetti System Garland.  With the help of Green Wedding Shoes garland tutorial and many, many trips to Michaels, I finally got it done, like 3 weeks later.  You better believe I'll be hanging on to that garland for my kids, hell maybe even my grandkids birthday parties!




So, the above picture is of the first bar.  This was the wine and champagne bar.  On a trip to Napa/Calistoga for a friends wedding we stopped at the Mumm Napa winery and my husband basically had to drag me out kicking and screaming.  Their Brut Rosé is my absolute all time favorite sparkling wine a.k.a champagne, but they can't call it that for some silly reason like it's not made in France...  So I ordered a case of Rosé and their Prestige Brut, didn't want all the boys drinking pink champagne, ha!

Party Favors.
I also ordered mini 187ml bottles of Brut (they don't have the Rosé, tear) and their AHHHMAZING champagne bottle stoppers, they totally keep it fizzy.  Then, I found this cute poster online that said "Time to Drink Champagne and Dance on the Table" printed it out on card stock & used the Fiskars Lever Punch, the Tag XX-Large one to be exact, to punch them out.  Finally, I tied the stoppers to the bottles with some gold string I found at Michaels.



Bar II
Back to the bars, the second bar was for my alchy friends, totally kidding, but we did have a second bar for booze & mixers :)  As you can see we got the biggest bottle of Cinco Vodka we could find & Crown for the boys.  For mixers we used this awesome juice & sparkling soda from Central Market that is great to mix with vodka and or champagne!
I ordered the grey & white striped paper straws online from Kikkerland, but I think you can get them at Bed Bath & Beyond, limited selection.


I scavenged local flea markets, antique stores, goodwill & salvation army stores for table settings & glassware pieces.  I found a ton of mismatched china to give the table the vintage feel I was going for.  I found some awesome turquoise candle sticks at Mission Open-Air Flea Market, which gave me another pop of color.  Then I found some matching turquoise glass wine holders at Goodwill!  I also found some cute rose shaped candle holders at Michaels and some silver votive candle holders to help light the table.

My best finds came from the Assistant League of San Antonio's Thrift House.  I found 2 set's of 12 "Coupe" Champagne glasses, ya know the ones that look like a saucer glass with short stems and a wide rim.  I also found a ton of cool glass containers, china and silver pieces!  Best part of all, all the money I spent goes to a great cause!

The most difficult finds were definitely the napkins and table runners!  I scavenged Pinterest and Google looking for affordable chevron striped napkins and finally after hours and hours of looking I found the mecca, Exclusive Elements.  They have tons of patterns and colors of Damask napkins and runners and they are so much more affordable than anything else I found, $2.50/napkin vs. $10/napkin!


My mom helped with the desserts and the floral arrangements, thank god!  Local florist Alamo Plants and Petals made the gorgeous arrangements with Peonies, my fave!  We ordered petit fors with 30 written in pink frosting from Central Market and miniature cupcakes from Kate's Frosting, all delish!  And last but not least, the tables, chairs and white linens were rented from Aztec Rentals.


I have been collecting candy jars and cake plates for a while now, and was so excited to use them for the dessert table!  I found these cute china paper plates on Pinterest from Fancy Flours and ordered 2 different patterns to keep with my mismatched china theme!  They worked out great, one less thing to clean up!




For the place cards I broke out my old school polaroid camera and as guests arrived we took their photo's.  Then we put the picture at their seat for them to find later!  It turned out to be a great keepsake as well :) 






Here are a few more photo's from the celebration!