Back in October, I had posted on my old blog about looking for elegant Table decorations….I have moved that post over here and you can find it at this link.
Each month, the last Sunday of the month, the church has what they call Teen Afterglow. This is usually sponsored by a couple in the church, it is a different couple each time….and there is usually food provided for the teens…it can be anything you want, a taco bar, snacks, desserts, whatever you want to provide.
I signed up last October to provide the food for this January. Usually this event takes place in our Gymnasium which is quite big in comparison to the number of teenagers. We have about 15 teenagers give or take some either way and the two adults that are their leaders.
I asked early on if I could provide the food in the Ladies Sunday School room which was adjacent to the gymnasium. This is a much smaller and cozier environment. Once I had permission, the wheels in my brain started turning…I wanted to provide a Winter Wonderland setting that was really elegant; something that the teens had never had done for them before. This is the room before….
The picture below is the wall directly opposite the glass door in the picture above.
This picture below is the wall directly opposite the double doors in the first picture.
So as soon as the Christmas decorations started going on sale at Hobby Lobby I went scouring the aisles….I was looking for snowflakes and anything that might be winter related but not Christmasy…if there were such a word….lol
I started looking on the internet for some inspirations and found some great ideas. I ended up making some souvenirs to remember the evening..those probably took the longest time but shouldn’t have 
.
Here is my inspiration:
Here is what I did:
The idea was to be simple on purpose and to get the significance of the star by itself…it is not something I pointed out to the teenagers but if anyone happens to ask about it I will share it with them….
I found a beautiful floral centerpiece on the internet that I copied the idea and made my own. I found some pretty candle holders and found a way to make something similar on my own.
I wanted to include a thank you to the teenagers for being inspiring and to thank them for being role models. Well this past January….out in blog land there seemed to be several people posting about their “word” for the year….either what they wanted this year to be or what they thought last year summed up would be….anyhow….Michelle over at She Looketh Well…had a fabulous post about her word and it was the inspiration for what I shared with the teenagers. Michelle focused on what she wanted to pursue as a mom and I adapted some of her ideas and added more of my own to apply to the youthful years of a teenager. I then included our thank you and a scripture verse at the end.
We strung white Christmas lights all across the ceiling and turned off the fluorescent lights which gave a soft warm glow. We then had over 60 snowflakes that were hung in three different sizes all scattered around the room.
I saw these beautiful centerpiece flower arrangements and wanted to try and do something similar:
I was wanting to try and do the smaller square bottom one on the right…..well this is what I ended up coming up with….
I took two vases from Hobby lobby that happened to be 50% and then bought a half round florist foam that was about 6.5 inches or so and cut it down some because I needed it to be around 5.5 inches…then I went to three different Dollar Tree stores and bought a combination of white rosebuds and white roses that were open and mixed them all up and filled in the dome….
Then we took Dogwood branches from our yard and spray painted them white….
Once the branches were dry I took a paint brush and painted them with Aileen's glue all around each branch and covered them with a combination of German’s glass glitter and another product called Vase filler that they use for making it look like Iced snow on branches.
The larger plastic looking pieces are the vase filler and the sparkles are the glass glitter.
And then let them dry and stick them into the foam.
The crystals were also purchased at Hobby Lobby in their Christmas stuff…they are plastic but it was great that they had snowflakes!! The bottom inside the vase and inside the bottom of the candles were the little round iridescent half marbles.
Each of the tables had one large candle display with two tea lights on each side spreading out the length of the
and tables. We had bought this glittery ribbon to use as table runners in blue and white however that was before I had found a great deal on these tablecloths and organza overlays. So we used the ribbon to make sashes on half the chairs with a bow on the back of the chair.
This was my inspiration:
I think those were sawarsky crystals on like a bracelet that went around the candle holder.
Here is what I did:
I took candle holders from the Dollar tree and used Aileen's Tacky glue around the top edge and then purchased German Glass glitter and sprinkled it around the top edge. I bought a 66’ strand of iridescent beads in the Christmas decorations at Hobby Lobby and cut it into 12’+ lengths for each candle display… someone said you could use sugar but I don’t think the sugar would be as sparkly as the glass glitter.
My husbands idea was to use tape…like masking tape so I would have a straight line….
Neither one of us would recommend doing that again….luckily I had two left that I did not tape and just eye-balled it with the paint brush…..you can’t tell the difference and the issue was that the glue got on top of the tape and then when it all dried, I had to go around each candle holder with an Exacto knife and cut through the glue and glitter to get the tape off!! Just free hand it!
There were two fake palm trees in the room that we moved to either end of the buffet and used lights in amongst the foliage to give an extra glow.
Overall, the evening was a big success, the teenagers were wowed and awed and very appreciative.
After having had been sick for weeks, I was finally better until about 3am Saturday morning when I had a sore throat and when I woke up later that morning, my nose was completely stuffy. All day Saturday I worked on the preparations and then we had fellowship dinner that evening at church which I had made two casseroles….there was to be extra people there that night…..I had one of those casseroles in the oven for close to two hours and it was still frozen in the center…arrgghhh…. we ended up putting it in the fridge and getting off to church… I was just praying the whole time to be able to get home as soon as possible 
I had 8 tablecloths I needed to iron and it wasn’t until I had called my parents asking for prayers for my strength to get through what I needed that I realized I still needed to frost another cake… I went to bed at 10:30pm Saturday evening exhausted….I got up Sunday…. the morning of the event….my goal was to get to church early before everyone else to unload everything because it was to be a surprise…..
There was no way that was going to happen….Tim took the children to church, I went back to bed, my legs were freezing. I got up once and did some work, went back to bed…and then slept and sweated out a fever…which was a huge blessing, I felt like this fog had lifted….I wasn’t better but felt I had the strength I needed to get done what was necessary. I arrived at church at about 1pm and it took until about 5:30 to get everything all set up, which gave me a few minutes to tidy up loose ends and get myself cleaned up before evening service. I took some cold medicine at the start of service which really helped me the night before so my nose wasn’t running….no such luck yesterday, it was like I hadn’t taken anything, my nose was on run non-stop.
It was about 10:30pm last night when we finally left the church and everything was as if nothing had ever occurred there. We came home brought the refrigerated items in and fell into bed! There was only one small casualty yesterday…you see those chairs in the pictures….I was standing on one of those to hang up snowflakes well one time I was up there and moved my leg and it slipped off and went down through the hole on the back side of the chair….I had a snowflake in one hand and that went flying across the room like one of those little ninja discs…good thing no one was in the path of that thing! but I have a nice black and blue mark on my upper calf…drats!!
That second casserole…..came in handy this evening…now I know why God did not need me to bring it to the Fellowship dinner, He knew I would need it today with no energy to cook!!!
So here are the pictures of the room….you always think you capture every thing and then realize later you don’t but this is what I have….
This was with the lights on….with just the candles lit on the buffet table.
You can kind of see the sashes that I made for some of the chairs on the left side.
Again, this was with the lights on but wanted to show the snow flakes and lights….
I had tinfoiled out the glass door and window so no one could see in and it would be a surprise
I put all the food trays together myself and made the carrot cake and chocolate torte.
It just so happened, I had a skirt in my closet that had snowflakes on it!!!!
The end…….
and we are both thinking it is probably a boy but we both know that God can do anything and He is the one ultimately in control.... I won't see my MW officially until Feb. 23 at 14 weeks which is normal for her mom's who have had multiples. I may stop by next week to pick up some more Cal/Mag. vitamins but that would be all and to have an official preg. test.
so I am going to be tenacious about making sure that I am submissive when I should be and not balk at the simple things….I couldn’t believe myself over the weekend when I was just typing out a list of to do things from my husband and uggh, the attitude I had about the order…of all things… the order in which something was listed or the way it was worded…sheesh….it was just atrocious… so I need to work on that and do a much better job…just be submissive and do things without thinking I am always right or that my way is the best way, etc.