Last weekend, I hosted a birthday party (on the front lawn) for one of my beloved gal pals, Hope… she’s the kind of person who doesn’t know strangers, always makes everything fun, always includes everyone (aka the anti-mean-girl – and you can’t get enough of those), has an easy-breezy and ever-positive spirit, an infectious love of life and a larger-than-life love for Taylor Swift. Which has infected ALL OF US, including yours truly:
Anyhoo. Besides kicking ass at life, Hopes (a fellow design guru) is also insanely creative and has mad ingenuity. For her birthday this year, she wanted to do a “laid back dinner outside” with just a handful of her closest friends… and had a fun, boho vision of laying out blankets and lanterns around a low table. As soon as she said that, I knew we were about to embark on something magical in a Woodstock / flower power sort of way. This was the vibe we were going for:
And – YOU GUYS – I gotta tell ya… this was SO EASY. So I promise you can do it at home this weekend if you wanna. We only had a few days to plan and for a second, Lilly (my co-conspirator, aka Princess Jasmine) and I panicked and thought we were going to have to rush order all sorts of hippie hoopla from Etsy, buy West Elm out of lanterns, etc… And theeeeennnn we decided to just chillax and try to use what we already had. Here’s what we needed:
- String Lights (and some way to hoist/rig ’em up over the table)
- Low Table (at the height you can sit on the ground and eat)
- Blankets
- Pillows
- Lanterns
- Flowers (for centerpieces)
- Flowers (for flower crowns – more of Hope’s genius vision)
- Tableware
- Gold chargers
- Temporary tattoos (duh)
We also thought about trying to make everything match and coordinate, and then (psssssht) threw caution to the wind and decided that – whateva – it’s boho, yo. The curtains aren’t supposed to match the drapes… (this all goes back to my theory about how when you put a bunch of things in a room that you love, they somehow miraculously look great.) Here’s how it all shook out:
SATURDAY, 12PM:
Hope (with her Chicago besties in tow) brings over some stuff she had at home: blankets, pillows, votives, tea lights & gold chargers. And flowers she picked up from the market… for centerpieces and (duh) for flower crowns.
SATURDAY, 12:30PM
Some dude delivers a massive, 300lb parquet dining table that Hope just bought off of Craigslist for $20. Girlfriend can scout a deal, I tell ya.
But since she wants us to sit on the ground, we know we have to hack off the legs. So we plop down around my coffee table to gage how high we want it, settle on 17″H, and measure/mark the legs on the new table… remove them (luckily, they screwed off) and Hope ran to Home Depot to have them cut down (there’s usually a small fee to do this, but the nice fella with the saw did it for free for her. Aww.)
SATURDAY, 1:30PM
Temporary tattoos {from Pigment}, check.
Pick up cupcakes from Pure Cupcakes down the street. #nomnomnom // {Meanwhile, Princess Jasmine is baking a homemade lasagna and scooping up a salted caramel cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory. Otherwise, we pot lucked it.}
SATURDAY, 2PM
Gus resting up for the festivities. The excitement of party prep has already sidelined him. Obviously.
SATURDAY, 5PM
Hope comes over to help start setting up. Neither of us have showered, and nothing’s set up yet. Party starts at 6:30pm. NBD.
First order of biz: rigging the string lights. We only had one measly string of lights and no trees close enough to hang them from, so we stuck some old pieces of molding (pulled from a heap of &^$# in my landlord’s garage) in a pot and weighted it down with bricks. It only fell about 18x before we finally stuck the landing:
Then we heave-ho’d the table out and laid blankets/pillows around it. I scored the vintage batik runner on Etsy a few months ago:
We set the table with the votives and flowers Hopers brought + a bunch of mismatched antique glassware I’ve been collecting since before Baby Jesus was born.
Extra blankets got draped over the backs of the Adirondack chairs to make them a bit cozier. I bought the giant lily lanterns at Celadon Home in Charleston about 10 years ago.
{Hopes putting out the last few Moroccan poufs}
6:30PM: TABLE SET!
{Chargers – $1 at Michael’s // ikat plates & plastic silverware – $1 at Wal-Mart // floral napkins & confetti – leftover from a wedding shower Karrie recently threw // antique glassware, Mexican bowl and runner – from the depths of my closet}
6:45PM: BOHO YARD PARTY COMMENCES
{to the tune of T-Swift – if you really wanna play along listen here}
7PM: DIY FLOWER CROWN CRAFTING COMMENCES
{Easy tutorial here}
…even Gus was in on it.
He loves his Aunt Hope.
8PM: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
How cute is she??
8PM – MIDNIGHT
Taylor gets louder & louder… Gus takes 400 laps around the table to show everyone his stuffed animal, then disembowels it on the lawn… neighbors try to complain about the noise but then decide coming over for birthday cake is a better plan, we may or may not have camped on the lawn, etc. Good times.
So the moral of the story is: Gowel… don’t stress! Use as much of what you already have around the house as you can, don’t worry about everything matching, and have everybody bring a dish so you don’t have to do all the cooking. Teamwork is a wonderful thing. #Girlsquad #easybutton
Howeva – if you don’t happen to have string lights & kanthas & colorful tableware just laying (is it laying or lying??) around, here are a few picks I love:
edison bulb string lights, target, $24.99 :: vintage hmong batik runner, similar to shown, about $79 :: chatoyant tumbler, anthropologie, $10 :: geometric appliqué pillow, target, $24.99 :: tie dye lumbar pillow, target, $24.99 :: fleur & frond bowls, west elm, $8 each :: faceted lanterns, west elm, $49-$69 :: bohemian kantha quilt, etsy, $89 (UM – I *LOVE* THIS ONE – somebody better go buy it before I do.)
As for the morning after… have truer words ever been spoken?
xoxo!!
