Christmas Party Ideas {at work} - Parties for Pennies

Hey party people!
This blog, as you know, is a side thing. My full-time job is working on air at a radio station in Atlanta, GA (104.7The Fish, 920WGKA & BIZ 1190). One of my responsibilities is endorsing Carriage KIA, an awesome car dealership! I needed to make an appearance at an executive event this past week with KIA and since I was going, I helped decorate the tables. Here are some Christmas party ideas…specifically in a work environment.

The centerpieces were created with cheap IKEA vases that I DIYed to look like mercury glass. I pretended I worked in a flower shop and created the flower arrangements. That was just trial and error but by the end I had a process.

Heidi’s Dummy-Method to Flower Arranging (at least this one)

So my editing skills could use some help but hopefully this will help.

Basically, the spider mums were my main flowers. I used 5 of them because I know in home decorating odd numbers are more esthetically pleasing. I just wanted a little pop of color so I only added 1 to 2 red carnations (for the larger one, like above, I added 3). I used a lot of the frazier fir branches and mini white carnations to fill-in the arrangement around the mums & red carnations. Then, I tried to stick a couple of the red berry branches in to add a little more texture.

Are you wondering about the cost?

I made 6 medium, 2 small and 2 large centerpieces for a total of 10.

Cost:

3 Spider Mum bouquets (from Costco) = $8.99/ea ($27.00 total)

1 Red Carnation bouquet = $8.99

1 mini white carnation bouquet = $8.99

2 red berry sprigs = $3/ea (they were on sale at Michaels) $6 total

Frazier fir branches = $0 (picked up remnants from Home Depot near the Christmas trees)

Total: $51

This makes the total for each centerpiece $5.10

Whoo hoo!

The tutorial I used for the DIY mercury glass is from Teal & Lime. The hardest part about this project was finding the stinkin Krylon Looking Glass paint! I went to 5 stores before I found them at Hobby Lobby. Hopefully I can save you a few trips.

It only took one can of the Krylon Looking Glass spray paint to do 10 vases. I got most of the vases at IKEA but one of the large ones I found at Goodwill. I wish I had found more at Goodwill. I was just being picky. Total I spent $22 for all the vases plus the paint so it ended up to be $34 or $3.40 for each.

And the “runners” are just strips of wrapping paper from Target.

I used these frames from Mike’s Mad Men party which worked great. The only problem was that I only had 4 so I had to get creative.

I used extra berry sprigs for some of the menu cards. And I used ornaments for the desserts…

To hold the menu card, I took a paper clip & wrapped it a couple times around a pencil. As you may know, the ornament is round so I added a little tacky stuff to the bottom and it worked great.

A cheap & easy decoration is using an apothecary jar filled with ornaments.

With a few thrifty ways, we were able to transform a break room to a Christmas luncheon. Everyone had great food…and hopefully felt honored…

I hope the employees aren’t mad at me for taking their picture mid-eating. They were all wonderful people & I kept hearing that KIA is an awesome place to work.