A Tiffany Style Sweet 16 - Part I

One of my best friend's daughter is turning 16 and I have been asked to help plan her party. This might come as a shock and a surprise, but in all my years of party planning I have never had the opportunity to do a Sweet 16. It's been a few years since I was a teenager, so I thought I'd study up on the latest trends. My research started (and quickly finished) with reruns of MTV's My Super Sweet 16. Even though it was painful to watch, I did realize that teens have strong opinions and that it would be in my best interest to include the birthday girl in the decision-making process.

The very first thing that I needed her to decide on was a theme, which took no time at all...Tiffany's. I love the color, I love the store, so this worked for me too. My friend is inviting a large number of out-of-town guests and wanted to send Save-the-Date cards asap. I happened upon a picture of the iconic Tiffany little blue box that I thought would be great for the cards. The birthday girl's name is Tayler, so I figured I could personalize the card in some way. Here is the original image...



And here is the image that I created using, of all things, Windows Paint tool...


I know there are a ton of really powerful tools out there that are specifically designed to manipulate images, but who knew that little old Paint could do all this? I had to keep the etched look of the font, so I kept playing around until I figured out which letter and symbols could be used to make the ones I needed for Tayler's name. Can you tell? Of course the T, A and Y came directly from the Tiffany name. The L was made by flipping the F and erasing the little middle part. The E was made by adding the bottom part to the F. And finally the R was made by taking a little piece from the & symbol and combining it with the F. Okay, it sounds a lot more complicated than it was...seriously. All this to say that you don't have to invest a lot of money in software to make cool stuff happen.

For the Save-the-Date card I put the 'Tayler & Co.' picture on the outside of Tiffany blue folded note cards.



Here is a look at the inside of the card...



One of the coolest aspects of this party is that Tayler will have a Sweet 16 court to celebrate alongside her. The court will be made up of close friends and family members. I wanted to come up with a fun way for Tayler to extend this invitation to her friends when I stumbled upon a large silver fortune cookie - that was all the inspiration I needed. The actual invitation was written on the fortune that was placed inside the cookie. It read..."It would be Tayler's great fortune if you were a member of her Sweet 16 Court!"



The fortune cookies were then placed in...wait for it... Tiffany blue takeout boxes. I tied a white bow around the box to resemble the original little blue box - I just love it when a great plan comes together!



I am currently in the process of designing the invitations and ironing out a billion other details, so stay tuned for future posts about this shindig.