Having A Party

I've had this song stuck in my head all week while writing and planning the posts for Party Week, and I tend to get it stuck in my head on the day of a party. It's sort of apt for today too, as New Yorkers are planning hurricane parties for tonight in anticipation of hunkering down to weather Sunday's anticipated brush with Irene. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed Party Week as much as I did! I love thinking about parties.

Have a good weekend, friends. And if you're in the Northeast, be safe and stay dry!

Surprise 29th Birthday Party

Apparently, I have very sneaky friends. While we were making plans to surprise our friend Tracey for her birthday, they were busy planning to surprise me for mine. A whole week before my birthday, so I wouldn't suspect anything! But, worried that I wouldn't love the idea of a true surprise (I'm not much for being the center of attention), they decided to tell me.

The night of the party as I walked to meet some friends for drinks, my roommate texted me, "Have fun at drinks! Please don't be too late for your birthday party in the garden. Starts around 7:30." The friends I was meeting for drinks were in on the whole thing! We drank bourbon-spiked Arnold Palmers, then we went back to my place to the party. It was perfect to be surprised by the fact that I was having a party, instead of by people hiding in a dark room. And oh, what a lovely party it was.



I was greeted by a garden full of my favorite friends and pretty sunflowers. Dinner was grilled hot dogs and burgers, followed by a make-your-own ice cream sandwich bar. I've been so obsessed with ice cream sandwiches this summer! There were snickerdoodles, my roommate's famous chocolate peanut butter cookies, vanilla ice cream, and my favorite coffee bean ice cream from Trader Joe's.





It's sort of impossible to put a candle in an ice cream sandwich, so Bethany held a tea light over my dessert while everyone sang "Happy Birthday." I'm sure my cheeks were bright red.

The funniest part of the night was the photo "booth" they put together. All the props were Liz-inspired, made up of my favorite items of clothing: cardigans and scarves. With the addition of some of my roommate's hats and a fur stole, there was enough in the prop box to make for quite a hilarious photo shoot.







At the end of the evening, when the sunflowers had taken up semi-permanent residence in my apartment and some folks had already headed home (it was a Monday night, after all) the last few celebrators stuck around to watch me open my present.



One of the lockets I've been coveting all year! I truly have the best friends. That birthday was so great, I think I'll just stay 29 forever.

Paper Party Hats

One of my favorite bits of party planning is thinking of a few special things to set the party apart from a regular old hang out (since my favorite types of parties are regular old hang outs with a little something extra). My plan was to make homemade party hats for Tracey's dino party as the special something, but the "homemade" part of the equation fell through. I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to create my own template and every hat ended up looking like a dunce cap. Oops!

If only I had seen this cute guide to making three types of paper party hats from Kate Spade. These look so simple!

image via weheartit

Sugar Cookies For A Party

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you'll know that my go-to party dessert is usually cake. But it's not always easy to make a cake fit into a theme party, without getting all Aces of Cakes on it. Enter the humble sugar cookie.





Cookie cutters come in all shapes and sizes, making it easy to tailor the dessert to your party's theme. For the dinosaur party last week, my friends and I found some dino cookie cutters at whisk (they were the inspiration for the whole party!). I used my mom's trusted sugar cookie recipe and frosted them in dino-inspired colors. There were blue dinosaurs, right?

Party Budget

In her first post as a blogger with the Real Simple Simply Stated blog, Jordan Ferney shared one of her favorite secrets to planning a great party. You can read it here. But what stuck with me is something she mentioned off-hand, that she and her husband have a column in their monthly budget for parties.

What a great idea! Very practical if you find yourself hosting often or attending gift-giving occasions frequently. But it's even more fun to think about the months where there's less celebrating and you end up with a little bit extra. Would you save it up for a few months and do something big? Or throw a random little get-together, just because? I'm totally adding this into my monthly budget.

image via Jordan Ferney for Oh Happy Day.

Dino Surprise Party

How to throw a dinosaur-themed surprise party:

1. Have best friends who like to talk about dinosaurs a lot. In particular, one whose name starts with T, so you can call her t-rex. Make sure she's born within a few days of Jurassic Park being shown on the Intrepid.

2. Plan to surprise her with a small, low-key birthday gathering on the deck of the Intrepid, just before the movie starts.

3. Assemble a bag of party supplies. Disguise it as a bag of movie snacks (after you take a picture of it for your blog). Make sure it includes party hats, noisemakers, dino cookies, dino temporary tattoos, a few dino-themed presents, and flowers, because even a portable party should be pretty.





4. Check the weather report. Assume that a 40% chance of rain is not a serious chance of rain.

5. While in line for the movie, watch lightning rip across the sky. Be informed by the lovely staff of the Intrepid that the ship is one giant lightning rod and the movie is canceled.

6. Do not be discouraged! Move the party indoors. This will involve quickly hailing a cab, returning to your apartment, renting Jurassic Park, and frantically texting/calling the birthday girl to tell her that the party, er, movie has been moved. Frantically text and email her fiance to ensure her arrival.

7. Get your apartment into party mode in record time. Order people around, then apologize. The sky outside will be turning greenish-black, illuminated occasionally by lightning.





8. Confirm that the birthday girl is still coming, despite the greenish-black sky. Wait by the door with a party hat.



9. Surprise her.



10. Make sure everyone has a dino tattoo before the movie begins.





11. Watch Jurassic Park while insane amounts of rain fall outside. Laugh at 1993's version of state-of-the-art technology, scream when the one person in the room who hasn't seen the movie screams, and realize that those dinosaurs are still really, really cool looking.

Party Week!

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that I totally slacked on pictures of this weekend, so I have no Weekend In Pictures to share (you're heartbroken, I know). But the good news is, I took lots of pictures of a surprise party we threw for a friend on Friday night. And while planning that surprise party, there was apparently another one in the works for Monday night...for me!

So, since I have so many parties to show you, I've decided this week is Party Week on somewhere north. Break out the streamers!