Here's another essential part of event styling, the Centerpiece. My inspiration for the centerpiece are the beautiful skylines of New York. Since the tables of the reception are small, we have to create a small but elegant centerpiece without too much expense. It's all DIY here :D Here is the final look of the skyline silhouette centerpiece.



The centerpiece is made of black special board paper and we cut out the windows and shape of the buildings. A candle illuminates inside so the windows glow like the buildings at night. We also embellished the inside of the buildings with crystal stickers so when you peep inside you can see the sparkling details. Aside from the skyline cutout, we also made card numbers. It's made of white specialty board paper. I made the design in photoshop inspired by musical symbols and floral patterns. We printed it in the back side of the board paper and carefully cut them out. To put some color, we used the excess doodle pattern from the invitations. We placed them inside but not directly on the backside of the cut-out so there will be depth. You can slightly see the shadow of the cutout in the pattern when light hits it. Here's how our card numbers look like.

 

I love how the light casts through the window on the table! In addition, I also borrowed wooden decorative furnishings and little lamp post candle holders by Gerry DCarpio of GDC Events. Thanks so much Sir Gerry! :D You can also see the specially packaged sparklers that was used during the program. Finally, we added more candles and glasses, and sprinkled the table with sweet delights.

Thanks to my brothers, Mark and Aljo, and Wella and Lance. I couldn't have done these without your help!

Last month, i had my first opportunity to become an event planner for our thanksgiving party. I'll share little by little every detail of the party and share my thoughts and tips in a series of post called Project Red Party. I posted the moodboard that i created here which involves firetrucks, skylines and things related to music. The party is a double celebration since its my dad's 50th birthday and their 25th (Silver) Wedding Anniversary. They both work at the Fire Department where my dad is the city fire marshal and my mom is a government employee. Thus, the color motif that I chose is red, silver and black.

The first thing we planned out are the essentials of the party: the date, time, venue, and theme. After finalizing them, I started to create the moodboard and eventually the invites. I wanted to create a simple, fun-looking, hip yet elegant looking invitation without much cost. So here's the final look of the invitation. :)


The inspiration for the design is fusion of NYFD (New York Fire Department) and Jazz. We printed it in poster paper and embellished it with crystal stickers to give it a sparkling finish. The envelope is a 6-inch wide special scented envelope with a nice pearly texture. Then to give it a color, i printed a doodle-ish pattern in red paper and covered the inner side of the flap. On the other side of the envelope, we labelled it with the name of the recepient with some musical symbols. And finally, we sealed the invitation with a specially designed emblem of the event which is inspired by the logo of the fire department.

I'm personally satisfied with the design of my first-ever DIY invitation and my parents liked it too. Each invite roughly cost 15 pesos only. With a creative design and resourcefulness, you can really make a cool, cheap but expensive looking invite for your party. Here are some fun behind the scenes photos of us during the process of creating the invites.


Thanks to my brothers, Wella and Lance for helping me out :D More updates soon...