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It’s been a summer of being outside and getting to see friends we haven't seen since the pandemic started; and as we head into fall festivities, there’s no better way to end our long summer of fun nights than with a constellation themed party with all our friends! With a festive photo booth and Zodiac themed Horoscope Hangover Bags, this evening was the perfect way to start the spooky season with my favorite people, all with a low key celestial vibe!
When I thought of décor for this my biggest inspiration was the starry sky the signs of the Zodiac call their home. Fairy lights covered the bookcase and centerpieces for a night sky vibe, but the biggest décor piece and crowd favorite was the paper lantern decked Tissue Paper Circle Photo Booth, complete with pink and purple lighting and a galaxy light from my husbands office for a Celestial stage for all our polaroid pictures!
This beauty was similarly lit to an accent wall and photo booth in my Underworld themed basement for my Goddess of Spring Party, but she got more tissue paper and some pretty lit paper lanterns to jazz her up for this party! By devoting a whole wall to a photo booth, we got so many adorable polaroid’s, both for me to keep and for guests to take home!
While I wanted a celestial feel I will admit that I also wanted a reason to buy paper lanterns, so when I found these Gold, White, and Cream Paper Lantern Multipacks on Amazon I knew they would be the perfect affordable accent to my cloudlike photo booth as well as to cover my LED light fixtures in the basement. This gave a casual basement bar vibe for everyone to enjoy their food at cocktail tables, each decked simply with LED candles and some prettily DIY Dyed Wooden Blossoms.
While I bedecked my spring party in silk flowers, I hadn’t planned on any for this more simply decorated party, we needed table space for tacos! But when a company reached out to me with some beautiful wooden blooms, I had to take them up on it and they became perfect understated floral accents for this event.
Sola Wood Flowers is based in my old home town, Ogden, Utah; and creates a variety of different wooden flowers as an affordable and unique alternative to traditional wedding flowers, They were kind enough to send me some flowers and dyes in exchange for creating projects with them, and I had to take them up on it! While originally I was using them only to create projects for Wooden Flower Hair and Accessory Clips for my Halloween Costume and a fun Wine Bottle Wooden Flower Tablescape Centerpiece for my dining table; after dying them and creating some gorgeous Watercolor Ombre Wooden Flowers, I just had to use them to decorate around my house before I started crafting with them! As accents in my fairy light covered wine bottles on my bookcase and in the little candlescapes I had on the cocktail tables downstairs, they perfectly looked like falling blossoms that had been scattered around the tables and it was so fun to show them off before using them for my other Wooden Flower Projects.
For my Goddess of Spring Birthday Party, I made an Italian inspired tortellini bar, but this time around I wanted to make things a little easier on myself by catering a meal from our favorite Taco spot. Puffy Tacos with toppings, rice and beans were the name of the game, and they were the perfect accompaniment to my simple citrusy cocktails served 90’s kid style, in Reusable Capri Sun Pouches! I bought all sorts of alcohol and mixers to do more cocktail experimenting, but since I didn’t get around to testing them I went for some simple favorites, margaritas and vodka lemonades served in our freshly cleaned cooler! For a casual get together, I absolutely love them as they are easy to fill and also easy to make bulk drinks with. I could simply measure alcohol and mixer in each bag separately, then top with the sliced limes or lemons. These made for easy 12 oz portioned drinks that were easy for guests to distinguish between, limes were margaritas and lemons were vodka lemonades!
I wanted to give myself a break on crafting cocktails and cooking this party to put my time into a different aspect of my event, custom Horoscope Hangover Bags for all my guests! Filled with water, three separate snack mixes, and a custom star chart horoscope; these beautiful bags were the hit of the evening and certainly enjoyed the morning after. This was perfect for two reasons, first that we definitely needed hangover bags after the last party! Secondly, it gave me the chance to craft for two separate aspects of weddings that cross over into many of my current events, stationary and guest gift bags.
Wedding guest welcome bags are something I made myself years ago for my own wedding and are still popular today as a way to thank your out of town guests for making the trip out to your nuptials; by way of a gift bag delivered to their hotel room or by the bride and groom to make their stay special. One of the most popular styles of Wedding guest bags are just like these hangover bags, consisting of snacks, water, and a welcome letter from the couple or itinerary of the wedding weekend. So while these weren’t for a wedding, I created them the same way as well as used the opportunity to start experimenting with different homemade snack mixes!
The snack mixes I included in this bag I wanted to be loosely based on the elements of the signs of the zodiac; air, water, earth and fire. While water rather fittingly took its post as a bottle of water in each bag, the others showed up in the form of two sweet and one savory snack mix for guests to enjoy, based on some of my favorite childhood snacks!
I started with creating sweet snack mixes for the bags, starting with a rich and dense chocolate themed mix for the element of earth, which became this Pretzel Peanut Butter Chocolate Snack Mix. With a base of my favorite childhood sweet snack, muddy buddies, this mix was packed with mini cookies, mini reeses, chocolate covered pretzels, peanut butter pretzels, and several chocolate and peanut butter themed candies. It was a huge hit with the chocolate lovers of the group and the mix of pretzels and peanut butter helped balance the many sweet elements in this mix.
To balance the fact that the chocolate mix was, at the end of the day, a heavier sweet mix, I wanted my second sweet mix to be light and airy, and with the cloud in mind I created this White Chocolate Rainbow Kettle Corn Sweet Snack Mix to complement its darker chocolate counterpart. With a mix of lightly white chocolate drizzled kettle corn, mini oreos, and white chocolate kit kats as well as white chocolate Hershey drops, this cookies and cream style mix was given a rainbow kick with the addition of mini M& M’s and crispy M&M’s, with the pink and white circus animal cookies giving pretty pink pops to the mix as well as the feel of them being rather cloudlike looking themselves.
Now not all my mixes could be sweet, so when it came time to make the snack mix for fire, I switched over to the salty snacks and chips for creating a Savory Snack Mix for the bags. While I didn’t go for spicy heat I definitely wanted something that looked a little flamelike, and with cheese being my favorite form of chip this Cheesy Chex Savory Snack Mix was born! With a base of Chex and the newer Cheezit Snapp’d Crackers, this mix was accented with pretzels, ranch Bugles, and Goldfish, then tossed in traditional chex mix seasoning and baked for a delicious cheesy, salty and savory mix that was the perfect completion of the snack mix trio.
After creating all these tasty snack mixes, I just had to give them names and make them tags! I chose to theme them similarly to fun ways that couples sometimes theme snacks in their wedding guest bags as “something sweet” and “something savory” for the candies and salty snacks they include. I wanted mine to be a little more fun, so I named my chocolate mix “Something Dark and Dangerous,” my white chocolate mix “Something Sweet and Dreamy,” and my cheese mix “Something Salty and Savory;” completing each bag with a dapper little themed favor tag I created with extra vellum and favor tags I had on hand.
This trio of snacks and water was perfectly packed in a Wax Stamped Personalized Cub Bag, and I was lucky and found a set of wax sealing stamps that were all the signs of the Zodiac! This made each bag extra personalized, because I could personalize each bag with both my guests name and sun sign!
But the labor of love for this party wasn’t in the snack mixes, tags, or bags; but rather in the custom Zodiac Star Chart Pocket Packets for all the guests that gave me their birth time, date and location. While I can’t say I follow horoscopes in a regular way, I think they are super fun to read; to look at your own personality and be amused at whether or not you think it describes you. As I was doing research for star charts, what I learned is there is a lot of information that you can give based on it, which made it the perfect opportunity for working with some beautiful wedding stationary items that I’ve been longing to have a reason to use from one of my favorite DIY stationary suppliers, Cards and Pockets!
Cards and Pockets is an online wedding stationary store that hosts a large variety of DIY Wedding Invitation Supplies, but what I know and love them for most is their large selection of Pocket Invitations in a variety of sizes and colors. Pocket Invitations are the perfect choice for couples who have a lot of information about their wedding that they need to share; the base of the invitation folding out to reveal the invitation mounted in the middle, with a side pocket displaying RSVP cards, itineraries, and other event information. They provide a beautiful and streamlined way to give a lot of information, which is exactly what I needed once I learned more about what star charts entail!
As you might conclude from the fan of different cards in these pocketfolds, there is a ton of information out there for each chart and I have certainly shortened it a bunch too. I’m no real astrologer and used a free online resource , Just Astrology Things, as my guide for designing these cards and calculating each guest’s star chart. From all of the unique combinations of signs, planets, and houses that my guests had, I made a template for myself for each card, so that as I calculated a star chart, I could easily build cards in the future by copy and pasting the information from my master template. While we had a large amount of some parts of the sky, with all my guests being born within a decade of each other there’s still a lot of information I have yet to read and work into my template, but when its complete I will share these templates so you can make your own horoscopes for your friends, but without the writing and editing hassle!
When these templates become available, you’ll find them in the Zodiac Horoscope Star Chart Pocketfold tutorial and they will be created through my favorite online graphic design software, Canva! For these star charts and all my other stationery projects, I absolutely adore Canva and highly recommend it to anyone for DIY design! While there is a free version with many features for the beginning and intermediate home designer, I find great value in their Pro Plan, which gives a plethora of in house graphics, fonts, and elements to use at an affordable monthly rate after a free trial to see how you like it! You’ll notice I frequently use the fonts in the Pro plan in my templates, so while you can change the fonts to ones included in the free plan, I encourage you to keep the templates as is and instead learn all the fun features of this powerhouse of design features!
Each of my horoscope pocketfold packets had its information divided into 5 parts; consisting of the guest’s Sun Sign, Moon Sign, Ascendant Sign, and the position of the Planets in the different Signs and Houses. The Sun Sign is the one everyone thinks of with horoscopes, it changes monthly and, being the most common, became the invitation style centerpiece of each packet. I included each guest’s Moon sign; which is said to control the inner emotions and what you keep secret from others, in my small RSVP sized envelopes to add a little fun and mystery to them discovering their secret selves! I designed, cut and assembled custom sized cards for the rest of each guest’s Star Chart information to display in the side pocket, using the sizing of wedding stationary as my guide!
These Horoscope Pocket Packets were the perfect model for learning about designing & assembling pocketfold wedding invitations, after all I had already done the work in learning to design custom inserts in Canva; as well as printing, cutting, and assembling; the only difference was instead of wedding information, I was giving personality quiz results based on birthdays! It also gave me a good idea of how much making wedding invitations like this would be, and at under $2.25 a piece, these horoscopes may have taken a bit of time to make but as gifts for my guests they were very affordable!
After a night of margaritas, tacos, photo booth polaroid posing, and horoscope comparisons, all my guests departed safely to enjoy their snacks and water in the coming days, while I munched on my own the next morning after clean up, ready for fall after a full night of festivities!
OUR POSTS FOR THIS PARTY:
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