Dear Readers,
I know I have been away for a long time but I thought I'd pop back in to share with you this awesome surprise tea party my housemates and I put together for one of our other housemate's birthday. We recently moved to an awesome house with the front porch of my dreams. The birthday girl happens to love Alice In Wonderland and we thought what better way to celebrate her birthday then with a little themed tea party on our porch!? We managed to pull this off with only 1 week of prep time. I largely credit our combined good taste because we already owned some things that worker perfectly as decorations but we did get crafty and we did make that dreaded trip to the craft store. I say dreaded because it's so hard to control one's self in those type of places and it's easy to go overboard buying things but we managed to pick up some last minute, carefully selected materials and not spend too much money.
One of our best buys I think was the paper lanterns you see here. That Martha Stewart is a true genius and what I love about them is that they can be folded up, easily stored and used again! Don't they add the perfect touch of whimsy?
Another thing we got at the craft store was paper lace
place mats. They were only a dollar and worked out nicely. The tablecloth turned out to be perfect and looked great with the pink lanterns. We already had the tablecloth but for those of you tablecloth-less readers who are trying to throw an Alice themed party like this I would recommend searching for one with a bold but simple pattern. Polka-dots, zig-zags or stripes are ideal because they are playful but won't overwhelm the other items on your table, like these gorgeous tea cups! We decided we wanted to find some vintage bone china tea cups for a mismatched table setting. The cups doubled as our present to the birthday girl and she was thrilled. I hunted Etsy for cups that were different from one another but alike enough to look good together. (When selecting the cups I tried to balance the busyness of the patterns, the color schemes and the shape of the cups.) I got my favorite cup (the green one above) from Etsy seller PutzASmileOnMyFace. We originally planned to design our own 'Eat Me' 'Drink Me' tags but because of the time crunch searched for something pre-fab. Luckily, I came across a wonderful template that uses the original illustrations from the book! Another cheap decorating device we used was playing cards. They looked great fanned out around the place mats and also taped to the back of our chairs.
Our birthday girl happens to look a lot like Alice and we managed to find her old Alice Halloween costume, which we made her wear for the festivities! Another tip to keep things on the thrifty side, try borrowing things from friends. We borrowed a cute cake stand and Hookah! We happened to have a variety of tea pots and mismatched silverware already but those are things you could easily borrow instead of going out an buying them.
We bought some colored card stock at the craft store and made some helpful arrows for a bit of nonsense. We also had fun with these extra tall, trick candles. You can't tell from the pictures but the temperature during this tea party was above 90F! You may have noticed the pop-top glass bottles on the table top. They were filled with ice tea! We had rose, raspberry and black. We tried to keep the cakes light and refreshing so we made a carrot, a
lemon with black tea frosting and a
poppy seed lemon.
After tea we planned to walk to the park (we are lucky enough to live 3 blocks from Balboa Park) and play some croquet but it was just too hot. We opted out and watched Alice In Wonderland under the coolness of our ceiling fans instead. These
blow up flamingos were a great way to decorate the mallets because they were cheap and easy... plus they make the game a little more challenging just like in Wonderland. We blew them up and attached them with tape and wire. We had great fun putting together this party. If I had had more time I would have liked to have had a "red" carpet made from astroturf and it would have been great to play with size and have some things that were very large and some that were small. I hope this inspires and helps anyone else out there who's looking to set up an Alice themed party!
