High Tea

      For my daughter's 11th birthday we decided to have a girl's tea party so we invited a handful of her friends to high tea.
     
    It was a lot of fun to create all the decorations and relatively simple to put together.

At the time, I had just learned how to make tissue paper poms.  I'll try to add a link somewhere in this blog, because they really made for a pretty atmosphere. I love them so much!  Martha Stewart's website has great step-by-step instructions and pictures to lead you through the process, but you can also type tissue paper poms into your search engine and find many tutorials and how to videos.

www.marthastewart.com/265163/pom-poms-and-luminarias-how-to

For this party in particular, most of the decorations were handmade, from the invitations, to the lootbag tags to the tissue paper poms.
   If you haven't already gathered this from my other blogs, the dollar store is one of my favourite places to get party supplies on a budget. With a little bit of creativity and imagination you can create some really great decorations with great bang for your buck!
Making your own decorations, tags, invitations etc., also gives the party a nice personal touch, and to me a great party is made by the little details.

I found a place with free vintage clipart that you can download which is where I found the awesome vintage teapot graphic that I used for the invitations and the lootbag tags below.

graphicsfairy.blogspot.ca/

Inside the give-away bags each girl received a fun tea mug with several different caffeine -free fruit flavoured teas, along with some other sweet treats.

The banner was a little bit time consuming to make but well worth the effort, I think. I used a template to trace the flower shape onto a cherry blossom patterned scrapbook paper I purchased from Michaels Craft store, and then cut them all out by hand. The centre is cardstock and I think I used a bowl to get the right sized circle.  I did the lettering by hand because I wanted a particular font and size, and then simply attached to some pink ribbon and hung it up.

I used a few die-cut shapes (hearts, and different sized and styles of flowers) on various colours and patterns of scrapbooking paper that I had in my stash to create cute decorations that I hung by the front door.  It was simple and took no time at all to do and gave the front entrance way a fun and pretty party feeling.

Activities for the party included decorating sugar cookies with coloured icing, coloured sprinkles and candies,  chocolate fondue and some minute-to-win -it games.

High tea consisted of their choice of fruit flavoured tea, finger sandwiches and a variety of cookies and yummy desserts.

 I got a pretty tea set with small tea cups from the Salvation Army second hand store for a great price and the girls loved drinking tea from dainty cups with their pinkies in the air!

I had as much fun at this party as the girls did and managed to do the whole thing on a reasonable budget while still making it fun and personal.