A Merry Affair: April 2013

Where I grew up there weren't sidewalks, in fact most homes were found at the end of a mile long driveway, so having a lemonade stand was never a possibility. I really wanted my girls to get to experience this, but with a little more pizazz so we made them a custom lemonade stand!
My parents had an island on wheels in their old kitchen, the luckies just remodeled it so they gave us this awesome piece. We took this table and painted it pink. We cut pieces of plywood to fit in each of the openings and painted them with black chalkboard paint and screwed them in. Years ago my parents gave me this beautiful table that had fancy legs and other cute details. One day I stupidly left it out in the rain and the table, which was pretty old, fell apart. I could never bring myself to throw away these beautifully cut legs and pieces so I kept them. They were the perfect addition to our table! Julies only request was that we add a little open/closed sign.
We worked for a few nights and here it is:

Saturday will be the grand opening of J & J's Lemonade Stand! We ordered some adorable pink and black straws and matching bags (for the cookies). Julie has been working on pouring drinks and making change, and Daddy has been planning what artwork he will put on the chalkboards. We will update you with pics from the big event this weekend!

We planned and Easter Picnic at one of our local parks. We invited over 40 of our friends and family, planned tons of games and delicious food. It rained! It poured! The park was flooding, so we had to change our Easter Picnic from the park to our house.

So of course I asked myself, 1. how are we going to fit over 40 people into our house?!?! and 2. how can I make our house look like the cute picnic that we had planned.

I found some really cute picnic decorations on Oriental Trading, there were paper lanterns, pinwheels for our cupcakes, even a pennant cake topper, everyone knows how much I LOVE pennants. They were all light pinks, yellows, and blues which were perfect for Easter, and since they were on Oriental Trading they were a great price! You can find them here Oriental Trading Vintage Picnic Decor

Earlier I had made a million pennants for Jemmas fairy party, I was planning on using these to block off the kids egg hunting site at the park. Since we were inside I decided to hang them on the ceiling with the paper lanterns I had ordered.

We had tons of food to eat so I needed lots of tables, white lace seemed very picnic to me so we set the tables with white lace table clothes, mason jars painted white and tied with the scraps from our pennants, and tons of fresh flowers! I collect egg cups so each table had a few sparkly eggs set in my vintage cups!

I wanted to give each of our guests a little gifts so the girls and I filled 8oz mason jars with Easter M&M's (they were pink, yellow, and blue-I love it when everything matches!), we topped them with little square scraps from our pennants and tied them with a little bow!

As a fun little addition my hubby decorated the walkway to our house with adorable Easter drawings!
Like I mentioned we had tons of food! Everyone brought their favorite picnic treat and we made pressed sandwiches. My newest obsession is bakers twine, I ordered a pastel sampler pack along with some Glassine bags from a great local store Twine and Tape. We made six different delicious pressed sandwiches wrapped them up in the bags, added a label and tied them up-they were so cute!

We had rain the morning of Easter but the afternoon was dry so we got to have a great egg hunt! We visited, ate, and enjoyed the company of wonderful friends and family!