21st Birthday Cocktail Party!

Hi friends! As promised, I’m back with a post specially dedicated to… drumroll please… cocktails!!

A couple of weeks ago, I organised my sister’s 21st birthday and her heart was set on having a cocktail party! Fine by me, I got cracking on assembling all that we would need to create the best party ever!!

We bought balloons, cocktail glasses (these margarita glasses and pina colada glasses), all kinds of fun decor accessories to add to the glasses, obviously a ton of food and drinks, and some decor items for the table. Now let me take you around, shall we?

 

First up, the table, which we kept quite simple as it was not the main attraction. If you didn’t notice by now, the colour scheme was mint green and baby pink. So I bought two table runners one of each colour (pink one & green one), which I placed over a white tablecloth. I also bought pink and green candles from Flying Tiger (my fave store haha). We got some pink and green diamond beads in different sizes (from here) that we basically covered the table with. As for the two flower centerpieces, you might remember these stands from THIS blog post a while back. I just used two pieces of oasis (remember to soak them over night before use) in which I poked pink flowers and added a few branches of evergreens.

On the little glass side table is where I placed all the items that weren’t for immediate consumption i.e. that would only be used at midnight once the birthday girl officially turned 21. That included the champagne flutes along with the champagne bottle that I placed in an ice bucket, as well as the mini cupcakes from here, which were her “birthday cake”. Oh and I almost forgot the candles. They’re actually just water to which I added colouring and then I put in a bit of olive oil and a candle wick.

We also went all out on the balloons. We hung up a “Happy Birthday” banner, which was actually part of THIS pack of 22 balloons. The pack also included all the little hearts and stars as well as a huuuge champagne glass and bottle (they were definitely the selling point for me). Also, let me tell you, these balloons last foreeeever!! They’re still holding up 3 weeks later as I am writing this.

Now for the bar area. This is where we decided to lay out alllll the nibbles and fruit that would be needed for the cocktails. My sister chose the cocktails she wanted to make and we printed the recipes out using a black background and a chalk font to look as if they were written on a chalk board and then laminated them. We placed the recipes on mini canvas stands (which I bought from… Flying Tiger obviously haha). They ended up being sooo handy for everybody to know the ingredients and proportions for each cocktail.

I can’t even remember what kind of food we made but judging from the pictures there was all sorts of appetisers such as tomato, mozzarella & basil sticks, mini quiches & pizzas, chips with all kinds of dips, cheese twists… you name it, it was there.

  

There was obviously a lot of sweet stuff as well… we filled up lots of cocktail glasses with candy, which we topped off with all sorts of props to decorate the glasses.

I also created a mini beach (see picture below) made of brown sugar and just poked in some more of the glass decorations, including palm trees, the traditional mini umbrellas and flamingos. Looked just like a real wild beach! 😉

  

Speaking of things to decorate the glasses with, we obviously also had lots of fun paper straws that I placed in a big jar filled with transparent beads so the straws would hold up! I loved creating all these fun little props!!

 

On the kitchen island is where we placed all the cocktail glasses, the drinks and the mixers as this was “the station” where everybody made their cocktails. We bought this cocktail making kit – not the best quality but it did the trick.

 

This shot below is the only picture I got from any of the drinks they made during the party. This was a pina colada in a mason jar. Real cute and even more tasty!!

I hope you enjoyed the tour! It was honestly a really cool theme to work with and my sister and her friends had so much fun making their concoctions. All in all it was an amazing evening! I hope this was a little source of inspiration for any of your upcoming celebrations!

See you next week for ANOTHER special birthday… can anybody guess? x