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Thursday, April 7, 2011

Make A Wish Gala Centerpieces

For the past few months, I have been working closely with the Make A Wish Foundation of Utah for their annual gala that is coming up this Saturday!! I am very excited for this gala since its breaking tradition from the regular cocktail hour and sit down dinner in a beautiful hotel ballroom. The event will be held in the Clark Planetarium. The Clark has three floors of exciting space trivia and hands on games for kids of all ages to play. They also have an IMAX theater and stellar space shows. 

One of my main duties was to create centerpieces for this oh so awesome gala. Since we are holding at the Clark, we decided to make it a space theme; Galaxy of Wishes!! Here is my inspiration for the centerpieces...

That was the only picture I could find of a suitable centerpiece that didn't look super cheesy.  So after a couple of hours of work with my awesome volunteer Jayme....Ta-Da!!

 
 We used these colors to help match the invitation. The hardest color to paint was the black. It eats up a lot of paint. We used a dab motion to help cover the balls.
After we finished painting tons of 2" balls and a few 2.5" and 4" balls, we spray painted some glitter on them and affixed them to a base filled with rocks for some weight.


 We hot glued the balls onto the sticks to make sure they stayed put!


We had a great time putting these together. It only took a couple of hours to make three of them. We love them and can't wait to see how they fit in with the rest of the decor!!


xo: Ello

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Gina's Baby Shower

My oldest sister recently had her first baby, a darling baby girl. But before the bundle of joy came to be, I made sure my sister had a great baby shower. My sister loves Amy Atlas and so I used her as an inspiration for the party. Here are some pictures of the event.

My sister chose the theme of Ladybugs. I struggled for a couple of weeks, until I found the perfect picture of a ladybug and used that as inspiration for the invitation and all the paper which you will see. The colors obviously were pink, green, and yellow, with some white as accents. I made a pennant banner from different scrapbooks pages and hung them with simple ribbon.



I ordered some 24" White balloons online and had them filled at a Zurchers. It was hilarious to transfer these balloons because they need their own seat each! I rented linens from Specialty Linens in Pink, Yellow, Green, and White (only for banquet tables).

For the food table, I wanted to make sure each side was symmetrical to the other. I had the food and desserts mixed throughout the table with their own personal name card.

I couldn't find the perfect stand for the cupcakes, so I made one by wrapping large, medium and small cardboard cake bottoms in matching gift wrap. I then cut down four plastic columns and hot-glued them on the corners of the cardboard. Not going to lie, this creation wiggled a ton! But it was stuedy enough to hold the cupcakes.

One of my favorite desserts was the Chocolate Covered Marshmallows. They were delicious and super easy to make (or at least I thought they were). I had lots of clear glass displays, bottles, and vases to use for the table.

My family is Peruvian so this dessert is one of the specialties. Unfortunately, I didn't proofread before I printed, this should have been "Alfajores".


I also made custom water bottle wrappers that highlighted the Baby's name and Baby Shower date.

I like to make these as easy and efficient as possible. This baby shower was no different. I had a box on each table that contained all the materials for the games that would be played. Also, the centerpiece for each table was a empty wine bottle and thin branches spray painted white. I hot-glued mini clothes pins on some of the branches. I had each person write down an advice for mommy and hang it on the "tree". All trees had about 8-10 advice cards hanging which I collected and placed into a small album for Mommy.


I gave myself a challenge to not use anything that is normally used in a baby shower such as pacifiers, onesies, diapers, rattles, etc. Some of my sisters thought I was crazy for not wanting to use those baby items, but I made sure that it would look great without it. Overall, I won that argument. It was a great time, and people really enjoyed the food and decor!! And mommy loved all her gifts for baby!


xo: Ello