A Very Merry UN-Birthday to You!

Summer has been good to me this year and to say thank you to the sunny season I thought an official goodbye was in order. What better way to say so-long than to throw a party?

Lucky for me my friend Melanie is a born party planner and is always up for sharing her merrymaking skills when it comes to festivity coordinating. So we teamed up to have an end of summer UN-Birthday Party Bash.

Due to limited space I knew we would have to have a limited guest list which is the hardest part, who do we invite—or worse—who do we not invite? Jon had a great solution to this problem which was to perform a “pass-it-on” invitation-giving system. Melanie and I each choose a couple at random to invite. Both of those couples were given two invites to pass along to a friend of theirs and that friend was to pass the last invite to a friend of theirs. Make sense? I was super stoked about this plan but I have to admit, as the party date drew near I was feeling a little apprehensive as the adolescence in me began to take over, ‘What if the guests hate the theme? What if they don’t like me?’ were among the juvenile thoughts that entered my mind. Perhaps I am not as social as I’d like to think I am? Thankfully we ended up having an awesome guest list and they didn’t even seem to mind when the pouring rain threw us out of our own outdoor party forcing us to finish the celebrating in a somewhat squishy, not perfectly clean, basement.

Fortunately we had gotten in a good game of musical chairs and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey in a more spacious outdoor space. Once inside we had a couple more games, a white elephant gift exchange being one of them, (you can’t have an Un-Birthday party without gifts)! And of course we had UN-birthday cake made from rice kipsie treats.

As usual, one of my favorite parts of the party was designing and prepping the invitations beforehand. When it comes to birthdays, I couldn’t think of something more iconic than the pin-the-tail game so I rolled with that.

Each invite was hand assembled into a gift card tin which contained 3 pieces; the invitation, a felt donkey tail and a blindfold. (thanks for your help Melanie!)

The donkey tail had a magnetic back which enabled it to stick the tailless donkey image on the front of lid tin.

The blindfold was also made from felt with an elastic attached for wearing.

Once all the parts were in place we tied it off with a simple ribbon bow to make it look like a present (UN-birthday party, remember?)

The same donkey image was used to create party gift bags which the guest filled with candy on their way out at the end of the party.

All-in-all I was quite pleased with the way things turned out. Even though the before and after shots of what the rain did to the outdoor photo op secction was pretty sad looking, the spontaneity kept things silly and carefree.

Well, I guess it’s on to fall season party preparations…my favorite!