Community-Friendly Earth Day Celebrations!

Planning an earth day party for this weekend? Don’t forget to keep your local community in mind. Earth Day is the perfect time to support local artists and farmers. Buy your fruits and flowers at a Farmer’s Market, and keep your eyes open for small gifts and décor.  Farmers Markets are great places to find hidden gems like quilts and linens for decorating, or homemade jams and jellies for including in a gift basket.

Other Earth-friendly ideas: 

• Don’t spend tons of money on elaborate bouquets of imported flowers. Instead, go for inexpensive bunches of wild flowers (2 for $5 at my local market). Unwrap several  bunches and place in painted white pails for centerpieces. Keep smaller bunches wrapped in paper (just like at the market!) to give out as favors or tuck in a note card and use as place cards.
  
  
• Speaking of favors, fill cute and inexpensive Eco-Bags with a local jam, a bunch of flowers, and a packet of easy-to grow vegetables (for your area) to encourage your guests to grow their own vegetables.

•  Food: instead of using paper plates, have a fondue party! set out trays with items for dipping, and don't limit yourself to fruit or bread. There are many other ideas for fondue.

(Photo from the Daniel Island Farmer's Market website)




Unfortunately I'm a little late on the Earth Day Bandwagon, but hopefully this gets your creative juices flowing!

New faces around the office...er... blog.

Hello everyone! I'm Dani, and I'm a long-time friend of Nicole's, who also has the party planning bug. I tend to be quite crafty, and I love the homemade touches that can make an event unique to the people attending (and hosting!). Since Nicole will be quite busy with her wedding plans, I'll be popping in every so often to keep up with ways to customize your parties and events, and possibly with a few crafty touches for Nicole to think about for her wedding, too!

I love to travel and find new ways to have adventures, even if its in my hometown. You can keep up with my adventures and a few of my party ideas over on my own blog, Sweet Adventures.

Buried Easter Treasure

Every year, I take it upon myself to put together Easter baskets and some form of a "hunt" for my 3 nephews. They are getting older now so I collected some more sensible items such as t-shirts, sandals, and juicy flavors of gum. I planned on finding fun resusable bags to put everything in, but checked all my typical shopping places (Target, Walm-Mart, Marshalls &  Michaels) & came up dry! So suddenly, Easter arrived and I had a whole bunch of goodies and no way to present them! In desperation, I found 3 empty shoe boxes and was struck with an idea. What if I turned the typical scavenger hunt into a hunt for buried treasure? I drew up a map of the yard and marked it with three X's... handed each kid a shovel... and instructed them to work as a team to find each box because they couldn't open them until they discovered them all. It was a great new twist on a family tradition and I think it livened things up for older kids. And it totally made it seem like I purposefully "forgot" to buy bags!