Miss Party Mom: {Preppy Lemon Bridal Shower} August 2014

I met my friend Bri in 2010 and we've pretty much been planning her Bridal Shower ever since. Well, kind of... I mean, not in a, "we have the perfect theme!" sort of way- but in a, "one day I'm going to throw you a really special bridal shower" kind of way. Well, that day came this August 23rd and indeed, a special day it was! It was so fun to shower Bri with love, laughs and... new panties! A bridal shower isn't complete without a bunch of new panties, right? (Some of them were downright hilarious.)

A few of my friends mentioned to me that this shower didn't have my "typical" look... And I'm like, "Well- good... I didn't throw it for me!" I think one of the most important aspects to being a party stylist is to be able to design a party with someone else's style in mind. Of course adding your own detailed touches along the way is great- but if every party I designed had "my look" to it, I'd be working solely with a black/white and pink color palette! (Which couldn't be farther away from Bri's style btw...) Therefore I came up with what I named the "Preppy Lemon" Bridal Shower- which in my opinion, couldn't have fit my beautiful friend, the soon-to-be Mrs. Cote, any better!

One thing that I learned while designing this shower was that while a color palette plays a big role in the look of any party- it's ok to mix different shades of colors. I've always been on the fence about this and have spent hours upon hours making sure plates, cups and various pieces of decor were exactly the perfect shade... Quite possibly all in vain! I was really torn with the two colors in this shower: Navy and Yellow- because they can range quite a bit and I really wanted everything to match perfectly. I even second guessed using the striped backdrop because it was more of a royal blue than a navy blue. I also initially wanted a citrus yellow but when things started coming in the mail ranging from "school bus yellow" to "golden rod yellow" I decided that using various shades for both colors was going to have to work! And in the pictures, it's honestly hardly noticeable actually... So lesson learned: mixing shades is not only ok- but I may be the only one noticing.

One more thing I did for this shower was really try and utilize items I already had... If you know my former parties, you've already noticed that! From the bike (turq to yellow) to the newly spray painted gold basket-turned-cakestand, I made every effort to keep costs down and dig deep in to my inventory!

For this shower I partnered up with Party Pail, Inc. for a lot of my decor items. What a great website for finding color coded/themed party decor and paper goods to go perfectly with any theme. I simply typed 'lemon' in their search bar and was nicely surprised by what popped up- including these adorable Lemonwood Collection dessert plates (with gold foil seeds!) that helped drive home my lemon theme. I also used their quality solid color dinner plates, paper straws, and blue/yellow paper cups and lots of white paper fans for my dessert table backdrop!

Another vendor I was so happy to team up with was Marie at Sweets Indeed. Her custom candy kabobs blew my mind! She took Bri and her fiance Thomas' initials and made a custom edible graphic for each kabob... These were definitely a hit! They not only looked amazing but were really yummy! These kabobs come bagged and sealed and you can really taste the freshness.