First of all, some pics of the night to whet your appetite!

The aim was to create a floral, spring feel, relying heavily on the colour purple as reflected on the invitations of the party with an ideal budget of under $200. The party was held on the mezzanine floor of Celsius restaurants and the area has great “bones” – the decorations focused less on hiding the usual beauty of the space and more on enhancing the area and creating that spring feel!

Some top tips?

• As you’ll see in the budget breakdown below, we relied heavily on fresh flowers for decoration. This can be pricey if you work with a florist! All flowers for the event were bought from supermarkets, dairies and side-of-the-road vendors the day of the event. For the price of one bouquet, we got eighteen medium posies! These posies also made GREAT favours for the guests remaining at the end of the night.
• The Wishing Tree was quite the popular guest book and allowed guests to write perhaps more freely than they would have felt otherwise – reading a tag on the tree that said “Ireland 15, Australia 6″ certainly did make me smile .
• The $2 shops (and those of similar ilk) make fabulous places to pick up discount items – both sets of ribbons and the packs of purple polkadot napkins
• Many things can be repurposed from items you already had at home!

Not too shabby! If time had not been so constrained we could have definitely reduced the price of pompoms by purchasing the raw materials and constructing them ourselves. This could have reduced the price to just over $2 per pompom. It was sweet to see all the wait staff coming up the stairs to peer at the decorations in the room before the party started – we did have to laugh, however, when one of the chefs’ heads popped around the corner!