We’re counting down to January 14 when registration goes live for our (in) real life conference! It’s FREE this year – whoot! So save the date for April 26 & 27, 2013.  In the meantime, we’re delighted to be featuring a few of our favorite posts from women who participated in last year’s event. We’re sharing them here so you can get a peek at what all the excitement is about.

An (in)RL Craft & Chocolate Party!

Some awesome friends and I from church put together a Craft and Chocolate Party for ladies in our community! Can you say CHOCOLATE FOUNTAIN? Oh yes. It was that kind of party.

Our event was a part of the (in)RL conference for (in)courage. We hosted a local meet up at our church, Voyage. It was our first real community event as a women’s group, and we think it turned out really great if we do say so ourselves! We had a great time planning it and even more fun at the event!

So what did our meet up look like? Disclaimer: I’m a home decor blogger so of course, I’m guilty of taking pictures of everything but people. That is what I do. Forgive me. There were people there, I promise, and they were lovely. I’ll talk about them too because people was what this event was all about. But first, the details of how the party came together. I do like to set the stage for people to relax and have fun together!

I love putting together party details, but I definitely have to keep things simple.

If I get too bogged down in preparing for an event, I don’t enjoy the process or the party. I have a great group of ladies (who I adore more every day) who brainstormed with me and helped out tremendously, which made the event so much better and a whole lot of fun for everyone! That is what community is all about, working together side by side for the good of the team! Love that.

Because I don’t like to get too overwhelmed in preparing for an event, I just go with the flow on a few fun themes and see how they come together. My goal is to make a party fun and memorable by creating a feast for the senses and plenty to do to keep us active and talking to each other.

In shopping for the party, I focused on having a fun spring color scheme to tie it all together.

The colors were woven through everything from our cute little polka dot paper plates I found at Target, to our delicious packets of Tazo tea and fun fruity cold drinks to our springy TJ Maxx tablecloths, loads of fabric scraps for our craft making spring flower pins, and the absolutely gorgeous tulips and flowers we had in mason jars throughout the room.

To enhance the ambience, I bought two fruity smelling candles and had them lit throughout the event. And then of course, with the chocolate fountain bubbling all afternoon, the room smelled pretty much what I imagine heaven will be like. Our food table was filled with all sorts of delectably tasty morsels!

We set up several stations throughout the room with beverages (I used metal buckets with ice for the cold drinks), a food table in the middle with our chocolate fountain, and a crafting area with several tables filled with scissors in mason jars, glue guns, needles, thread, buttons and a fun selection of fabrics with samples and instructions on how to make flower pins. People could use patterns and instructions or simply wing it like I did.

Either way, all the flower pins turned out really cute. I wish I had taken pictures of everyone with their flowers! but once the party started we were focused on getting to know each other and crafting. Wish I would have stopped everyone for a photo, though. Next time I will! Or I’ll make someone else be in charge of the people photos.

This is the flower pin I made all by myself, my FIRST one EVER! I made it in about four minutes, it was so easy! It is VERY imperfect, but maybe that gives it a little charm (right?), so I was pretty tickled with it. I’m not crafty, you know, so making something like this was a rare accomplishment for me.

Everyone had fun making their pins and they were really adorable! I think it was the perfect craft for a party like this because you can’t really go wrong even your first time making one. It was fun picking out fabrics and working on the pins together. We were able to chat as we worked around project tables and ooo and ahh over everyone’s pins!  It was a big hit!

I made several new friends I really hope I’ll be able to connect with again (about 50% of the people there were friends of friends!) and all in all, it was one of my most fun parties ever!

And that was the whole point of (in)RL. To make new friends and connections in our own local community!

We have a small new church, so this event not only helped us to reach out to other women, but it was fun working together with our women’s group to host our first real community event. We really do have a great group of ladies who are all the hostesses with the mostess and I’m excited to see what we can do together as a community in the coming months!

By: Melissa, The Inspired Room

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