Hello! (And a Cookies and Milk Bar)

Well, once again I apologize, but a lot has happened since I last posted, including a whirlwind surprise trip to Iowa for my mom's 50th birthday party!

Last Thursday at 5 a.m. my sister and I left for Iowa, arriving at my parents at about 6:30 that evening. That was the surprise for my mom, who was very confused at first, and then we told her about her party and we all spent the next two days putting the finishing details in place to host 150 people at my family's old car museum in the little farming town of Williams.

One of those details was a Cookies and Milk Bar, which we set up in a prominent place in the museum. It featured four different kinds of cookies, white milk and chocolate milk, as well as quite the assortment of candy and other things for people to nibble on.

On Friday my mom and I made most of the four kinds of cookies, and the photo above is when the table was half set up on Saturday afternoon.

Before heading to the museum to decorate we chose dishes from my mom's collection - mostly from her pink glass collection - to use on the cookie table. She also got into her stash of vintage table linens, doilies and hankies.

Notice the tablecloth with the pink flowers - our table was also supplemented by several thrifting stops while we were in Iowa Falls on Friday. :-)

Pink teacups held Hershey kisses, and the wood box and some of our other accessories came from my Grandma Hemken's vintage kitchen collection in the museum's loft.

We used my mom's vintage green cooler to hold ice, in which we placed glass carafes of chocolate and white milk the next day. The dairy print fabric was also a thrifted find on Friday

I had brought my tub of canvas drop clothes from Wyoming - the same ones that we used for our wedding party over Memorial Day weekend, and that's what we used as the base to cover the tables.

We put some of the doilies on top of the cake pedestals rather than below, so they could be more easily seen.

And on Saturday we left a few extra containers, which my sister Melissa filled with wildflowers on Sunday right before the crowd arrived.

Here we have all the basics in place, and this photo shows just one of the groups of paper lanterns that we hung all over the museum - they really added a lot to the decorations, and looked great with the cars.

Another lantern group...

So then on Sunday afternoon we put the finishing touches on the table, filled the platters with cookies and strung the garland I made.

Credit: many of our ideas and inspirations came from the Celebrations at Home blog. If you like party decorating, you'll love that one!

A few model dairy cows completed the theme.

I also made some cookie label signs to place by each grouping, so people would identify what they were eating. The yellow cookies are a stray plate that showed up for the potluck - my family supplied the pork chops, and my mom and I also made a broccoli salad, but the rest was contributed by the guests.

You'll have to excuse some of my photography - I've been shooting on full manual this summer, and changing between the six different lighting situations in the museum proved to be good practice! Some of these my shutter speed was still a little slow from being in the more dim areas of the building.

The cookies were a big hit!

In addition to the folded cards, we also tied other cookie cards around the jars with twine.

And here is the milk on ice in the cooler.

The little white cow in front here was a project in itself - we found it while thrifting, picked up some white spray paint in town and Melissa painted it Friday. Although the spray paint crackled on the second coat due to humidity, it still turned out to be pretty charming.

In another area of the museum we also set up a drink station, which featured vintage coolers from the museum's collection. We put bottled water on ice in the red wood wagon, and the three little coolers and one tall one held pop cans. The folding table ended up going away. Once again - canvas drop cloths served to cover the garage door on that wall. They're pretty versatile and indispensable - we ended up using the whole tub! Those green and blue rosettes were a challenge in themselves - my brother Nathan had to get involved to figure out how to get the project completed. :-)

I have more photos of the 11-piece brass band that came from Omaha, the crowd, the food and the dancing - stay tuned for more Big Band Birthday Party posts!