samuel's big day...

over the last few weeks i have been busy designing and, with the help of my lovely creative assistant (aka Mum, creating decorations for a little boy's christening that went ahead this bank holiday sunday just gone.

what made this event extra special is it is the first one I have done for someone not friends or family, purely though word of mouth and the samuel's lovely mum spotting my work at a friend's birthday party. so special, but scary.

after initial chats I put together two mood boards with themes chosen by the client, thomas the tank and ipswich town. as is the case with a lot of my ideas, there was an element of the vintage and/ or nature to them, with features such as hessian table runners and old school colour pallets. not only is this typical of my work but it also compliments the venue, the local village hall. the ipswich town theme was picked and I set to gathering further ideas and prices.

the general idea with this theme was to stick to the team's colours as apose to emblazoning their logo everywhere. anyone can go out and buy a football team table cloth and napkins, what makes something special and unique to your party is creating something new and bringing together a range of ideas, or getting someone else to do that hard work for you.

so with old school royal blue and white stripe material and red material here and there, we created bunting to hang down the two lengths of the hall (keeping costs down) and a table runner for the cake table to add a splash of colour. bunting really is a tried and tested great way of decorating a party venue, it's traditional yet fun and it adds colour to otherwise drab walls. and especially with this colour pallet of red, white and blue, it oozes good old fashion British fun.

an initial idea for the table centre pieces was to attach a big perfectly spherical ballon to a little tin bucket filled with sweets. but to keep costs in line we changed the idea to little flags made out of surplus bunting material with a little ipswich town logo attached. flags are sinonimus with sport and football and again have an old school, childhood memories touch. the tin buckets were sprayed royal blue to bring colour to the tables and then filled with little chocolate footballs.

for the cake table with its stripy runner I hand painted a wooden toy tractor (for those not in the know with ipswich town their nickname is the tractor boys) in team colours for an additional feature and designed a framed sign with sport style font to direct people where to leave their cards. finally, we created additional bunting with samuel's name hand stitched on. this hung above the cake table and made a nice focal point. one great thing about going that extra mile with your decorations is that, if well planned, you can re use for further dos or use in your home. the name bunting might be something nice to hang above the cot maybe?

as ever, you could always go further with these things, the possibilities are limitless but I was really pleased with what we achieved and I left a happy lady. later that day I received some positive feedback and today a lovely thank you email. hopefully this event will translate into some more word of mouth recommendations and I just might be able to run with this...