A Vintage-Style Birthday Party

I actually did it today. I got up, got my son off to school and went back to bed. It is 9:59 and I am officially starting the day over. I have fresh coffee, I'm going to have breakfast, I checked my e-mail and now, sipping away, I get to talk to you. A much better start to my day.

This weekend we were in the lake country of Minnesota for my Dad's 60th birthday party. I had a lot of fun decorating for it and took a lot of photos so you could see too. For the party my mom and I didn't want to go the traditional black with the "over the hill" theme so instead went "vintage". My parent's have an etsy site selling vintage ware and so let me have free rein with the items they haven't yet posted (they are also teachers, so I made use of the old math cards as a sort of tribute). For the table settings, I just cut and rolled some spare upholstery fabric for the napkins, and placed the cute little silver plates next to each plate to hold the glasses. The little silver plates, I thought, would look adorable as little individual cupcake plates set at each spot at the table. We already had an amazing birthday cake though. A 3d birthday cake shaped like a mountain with a waterfall cascading down it that a coworker of my mom's made. It really was fabulous.

For a fun birthday vignette my Mom had the idea of using an old hanging clothes rack to showcase photos of my dad. I loved how that turned out and took a pic to share. We also used some old trays and stacked one on a pile of old books in the center of the table to add height to the serving dishes. It turned out nicely- for a finishing touch I ran out and cut a bit of sumac that was turning red and placed that in the vase in the center of the table.




I'm pretty excited by the fact that everything was done with things we had on hand. I think the element that took the longest was the banner and I don't think that took me much longer than 45 minutes. It was so simple too. I just cut a length of fabric and then cut triangles of old book paper. Then I stitched the book pages (they were stacked in two's) to the fabric piece with embroidery floss. Just right across the top. Then, to finish I used a Sharpie to write the letters on each triangle. SO easy- really.

So there you go- a tour of the party! Hopefully this gives you some ideas and maybe gets you thinking of some ways that you could decorate "vintage" for your next party. It's really not hard. :)