tales from the conference, part 3

Night 2: Alice and Wonderland Theme

The second night we had an Alice and Wonderland theme for the dance. The gym was huge so we concentrated all our decorations in one area, which I think was a good idea. We went to the YSA branch home evening the Monday before the conference and they helped us with these decorations: we made giant origami flowers, "eat me" and "drink me" signs, giant foam core playing cards, and our friend Jarrod drew a giant Cheshire cat that he and I painted. I was really pleased with how everything turned out.

Mini cupcakes!

Braeden baked mini cupcakes all day and they turned out fabulously! We bought the mini cupcake tins at Walmart ($4.96 each, as opposed to $22 at Bed Bath) and, since they were so inexpensive, we got 3 of them. We got the mini cupcake papers at Hobby Lobby. We bought three different kinds of cake mix from Hawkeye Food Distribution here in Iowa City where we got three 5 lb bags for about 5 bucks each and the only ingredient we needed to add was water. Plus, they tasted really good! We got cherry cake, spice cake, and Devil's Food cake. The frosting was also a mix we bought from Hawkeye Food (though in hind sight we probably could have just used powdered sugar) and we dyed them different colors for the different flavored cupcakes.

Carrot Cake Tea Sandwiches. So good!

We also made three different kinds of tea sandwiches which I was a little afraid people wouldn't eat, but they did! (One of the girls in the branch said that she thought that "Carrot cake on bread just doesn't really work..." but she can think what she wants because if she doesn't eat any that just means more for me!)

 

I think we estimated the amount of food really well which I was pleased with. I was also pleased with the trays we made up out of plastic dollar store trays and stemmed glasses. They look pretty good, no? We also made powdered lemonade with fresh lemon slices to make it a lil fancier and it went super fast: we probably could have doubled the amount of water to powdered mix to make it last longer, but oh well. After it ran out we just filled the drink dispensers with water which we had to refill even more often.

The decorations were pretty popular, too. As we were taking them down a kid came up to me and said he loved the Cheshire cat and asked if he could have it: I said yes.

Here is Doug with the cat. He was so excited!

I also offered up the paper flowers to anyone who wanted them, and our friend Marla said she'd like a few, and a few other people took some as well...

This kid Jeremiah wore one on his head.

In addition to the dance we also had other activities for people to do—which I lamely forgot to take pictures of—like "Build a giant house of cards" from cards we made out of foam core, a giant wooden chess set (which was wildly popular) lent to us by our friend Brian, "Flamingo Croquet" which was an outdoor croquet set we adapted for indoor play, and "Human Checkers" which seemed like a fun idea but since it needed 16 people to play I think that kept people from playing (and it was the farthest away from the dance floor). All in all I think we planned a very successful night.