Simple farewell party

We recently held a farewell (despedida) party for our very good friends leaving Uruguay (boo hoo).  I just added some very simple, and mainly paper, decorations to add a little bit of atmosphere to our party.  Our friends are moving to Asia so I went with a (very) loose asian/mainly chinese theme.

For the tables, I hung different sized tissue paper pompoms above them and, on the actual table, a chinese bowl with a floating chrysanthemum, a glass jar holding a candle got a simple chinese paper lantern slipped over it and I also used a citronella candle because the mozzies have been SO bad here.  This photo looks a little bare without the crockery and cutlery...oops.

We set up in our garage because it was quite a windy day (and rain was predicted but luckily stayed away).  The space worked out well.  The middle table also got a large centrepiece of some dead branches lightly spray painted yellow and then I hung some paper lanterns and lucky chinese nugget ornaments that I had saved from our stay in Malaysia (see, being a bit of a hoarder has it's advantages sometimes!).  Oh, I made some easy little crepe paper flowers too but forgot to get a photo of those.  The kids also decided they really wanted to add some Christmas balls so I figured some lucky red ones would be close enough to our theme.

(After the party, I removed the decorations and then moved the branches inside where we decorated them for Easter and now we are decorating them for autumn.)

I made a 'bon voyage' banner for the wall of the garage and am so happy with how this turned out.  I did this in Powerpoint and used pictures from the internet as texture fills for the shape.  If you want to know how to do that, just let me know and I will do a quick tutorial on it.  I also made all those little tassels and, once I worked out how they did them on the lucky chinese nuggets, it went a lot quicker and was much easier than my first attempt!  I used a multicoloured embroidery floss for the tassels which looks so pretty.

To keep some of the older kids busy, I also set out a craft table for them to make a paper lantern banner for the back patio.  These looked so good swinging in the breeze.  I also put up my scrappy fabric bunting.  At the bottom right of this picture is a large silver planter.  I am annoyed I didn't get a photo but I had floating frangipani (foam ones from Malaysia - thanks Kerry!) and floating candles in there for the kids to use as a wishing well.  I also provided a large container of small change and they really had a ball with throwing the money in and then the retrieval (I hadn't quite thought that part through so there were a few wet sleeves...oh well).