If you follow my snapchat (“happymundane”) and Instagram, you know I recently took a quick trip to Austin. Why? Well aside from Austin being such a fun city, I was also going there to hang out with my friend Kate from Mirror80. If you haven’t checked out her blog, it’s chock full of 80’s/90s awesomeness. With our mutual obsession with late century design, we were obviously destined to be bestest budz. It’s not every day I am in Austin, so we thought why not throw together a fun little party concept, and what better theme than a Palm Party!
I wasn’t going to be in town for a few days, and since this party wasn’t really for any specific occasion, we wanted to keep it super easy and affordable. Because we already had a theme, we basically just ran around a few Austin thrift shops and dollar stores to fill in the gaps. It also gave us an excuse to do some super easy DIY projects.
Luckily, we also had a little initial kick start help with these ameeezing paper party goods from Harlow & Grey. Have you seen their collections? Started by Jeanne Chan from ShopSweetThings, along with her sister Gloria Wong Tritasavit, Harlow & Grey is elevating paper party supplies and making them so chic and fabulous. I mean, look at this “Goddess” collection:
The peach with gold foil? … the marble? So gorgeous right? It’s all so sexy and fun! Check out their entire collection and start thinking of when you can throw your next party because you’re going to need to have quick just so you can have use these goods right away!
Anyway- so we started with the Goddess pieces as the base. Then we found some fun plastic cutlery and bowls at Party City. We wanted to have one additional set of cups to have for variety, so we came up with a quick DIY involving some yellow paint drips and plain pink paper cups.
We took that paint drippy motif and applied that to another easy 80’s Memphis inspired tray. We simply got a black lacquer tray from World Market, and cut up some colored construction paper and placed them in the bottom with a Memphis-inspired design. We lightly adhered it to the bottom with double stick tape. This way after the party, we could simply remove the paper and reuse the tray without damaging it.
Finally, it’s not going to be a Palm Party without palms right? and if you’re going to use palms, you’re going to need vases. So we went to a few thrift stores and picked up 3 inexpensive vases that had good shapes and did massive spray paint magic to them.
This was the most fun because in addition to using some super matte spray paints, we also got to try out this cool “marblizing” spray from Krylon. Have you guys seen it? (We found it at Michaels.)
It’s really fun. It does take some trial and error and getting used to, but essentially it comes out kind of like silly string, only a little finer. You just do sweeping motions and the spray lands on the surface in kind of a random… web? and gives the effect of marble.
The other paint trick we did was the good ol toothbrush splatter. I love using this technique to give a faux granite look.
After all the vases were done, we simple filled them with various palm fronds and it was time to party!
This was really going to be more of a light cocktail party, so for food, we just served a bunch of little nibbly finger foods (that also happen to look super cute and coordinated, lol) Mellon balls, cheese and crackers, and my favorite- jello shots! Because, as the old saying goes, “…there’s always room for Jell-o!”
I had such a blast collaborating with her, that I’m sure we’ll be having more 80’s inspired shenanigans soon!
Head on over to Kate’s blog where she goes into much more detail on everything, as well having a separate post on the DIYs we did.
All photos and styling by Happy Mundane/Jonathan Lo and Kate Simmons/Mirror80