Graduation Open House

I know, I know, I've been neglecting this blog. I just realized yesterday that I've posted only once each month for the last three months! Luckily with this post I'll be fixing that; it will only be two months in a row with one post now, instead of three. :P

Anyways, I do have good reasons for not posting, one of them being that I had a ton of work to do planning my open house. In years past, me and my mom had done very typical open house decorations with balloons, crepe paper, plastic table cloths, etc. and they were fine, but if you know anything about me, you know that I would have none of that "typical" stuff. I think I horrified my mom a little bit when I didn't want to get any of the decorations at the party stores we went to because she thought it was going to be impossible to please me. Honestly, I kind of thought the same thing. Fortunately that was not the case. We ended up having to hand make a lot of the decor, but it was worth it.

Below are the finished results:

The Food Table:

All the tables cloths we used were made from drop cloth from Walmart. I've heard of many others using drop cloth for things in their homes, but I had never done it myself, so I wasn't exactly sure how it would turn out. I ended up loving the result though. I even had several people ask me what fabric I used for the table cloths. Of course, I loved to see the look on their faces when I told them it was drop cloth.

Interesting story about the piece of wood on the table shown above. That's actually my attempt at making driftwood. Though, when I say "making" I really mean more of "causing." Because we had a baby pool in our backyard all of last summer, I decided it would be a good idea to put the wood inside the pool and just let it float in their all summer to see what happened to it. I didn't expect it would do much, but I was curious anyways. Surprisingly, after a few weeks, it caused the bark to become very soft, so I ripped all the bark off hoping to "speed up" the process and then put the wood back in the pool. After another month or so the wood looked pretty nice. It's not as twisted or contorted as REAL driftwood, of course, but it's still got a nice driftwood feel.

The fruit display was made by me (although I didn't cut up the fruit) and it's quite an easy thing to do. It really looks impressive too! We just used a cake stand and large serving tray to put the fruit on. You start with your melon rinds which you should save when you cut up the fruit. Place them where you want and then fill them with your fruit of choice, allowing some of the fruit to "spill" over the edge of the rinds. You can also use small bowls to hold the fruit (as you see I have done) if you don't have enough rinds.

Here's detail shot of the fruit.

I put sage colored ribbons on the serving bowls just to help tie them in to all the other decor. I had to super glue them to the bowls, but it really didn't work THAT well because the bowl's edges are slightly slanted which caused the ribbon to go on crooked.

I was both fortunate and unfortunate with the weather at my open house. Fortunate in that it was cloudy enough that the candles illuminated the table beautifully, but very unfortunate in that it rained very heavily during a good portion of my open house.

The Cake Table:

Outdoor eating:

In the end I was pretty satisfied with the finished result! It was very close to how I imagined it and, of course, it's always nice to see your imagination come to life!

Thanks so much for reading and as always don't forget to check out these awesome link parties.