Monday, March 3, 2014

Chorale Concert Refreshment Coordinator ;0}

Somehow, I was asked to coordinate the refreshments for the Minnesota Mormon Chorale concert held in Oakdale, MN last night.   Madison and Eli were both sick, so Scott, Emmalee and myself manned the event.

I was super excited to get to use my white table skirts again, the ones I made last month for New Beginnings.  Basically, I took one set of tulle curtains from IKEA, purchased for $5, cut them in 27" tall segments and ruffled them to a piece of tablecloth fabric I bought back in Arizona.  That is it.  For the concert I wanted to all a bit of class so I added the black swag around the table as well.

So, when I decided on the black swag...I was concerned about how to pull it off without spending a ton of money.  Don't ask me why my mind went there, but I actually decided to buy four plastic tablecloths from the dollar store, in lieu of spending $30 or more on fabric, and use them as the swag.  

I laid the tablecloths out lengthwise, gathered up the center and secured it to the table with pins.  Then, I gathered up the two lose ends, secured them to the table, and rolled the extra tablecloth up into a rolled flower style rosette.  I used straight pins to pin the rosette down as well.

As for the ends of the table, I wrapped around the ends with the plastic, leaving the back of the table without the draping.  It was also finished off with a rosette.

Half way through putting the draping on I started to lose my nerve.  I really started wondering if it just looked like a bunch of garbage bags hung on the table, but as I got the hang of it and finished up, I totally loved the look.  I don't even know that you would notice it was plastic if you didn't look really closely :0}

While the chorale was singing we did our best to get the refreshments out and set up quietly.  It is a difficult job to do when you can only enter or leave during song breaks....with a 5 year old as your personal assistant.  I think we pulled it off though.

So, we figured on about 200 people in attendance.  If each person had 2.5 cookies, that would mean we needed 500 cookies.  We had families bring batches and I made over 200 cake pops, bringing our total number of treats to 750 total!

When we left Arizona, I threw out my cupcake stand.  It had been beat up with all the use.  When I found out I would be decorating for this event, the cupcake stand was first on my list to make.  I learned a lot from using the last one.  This time I spray painted it with primer, a couple coats of white spray paint, then a couple coats of glossy shellac to seal in the finish.  

Oreo cake pops with black and white chocolate.  I was serving the water for a couple minutes and turned around to see the stand completely empty.  I was shocked.  I guess they liked them ;0}

As part of the decoration I also cut these treble clef signs out of 2" wood and the smaller one for the top of the cake stand.  

For a drink, we served lemon cucumber water.  One gentleman thanked me for the refreshing drink.  He said it was cruel of me to make him feel like it was summer already though.  I know the idea of cucumber water sounds really strange, but trust me.  I had a couple people come up and comment on how refreshing it was and how it was just a hint of flavor.  

I must say I am relieved it is over.  Next time we will have to make about double the desserts.  We ended up with over 500 in attendance instead of the estimated 200!  Now to get back to my other projects...

1 comment:

  1. Everything looked so awesome. And I love the treble clefs! ;)

    ReplyDelete

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