Valentine Tea

As you can tell I am a little behind on blogging.  It's June and I just posted about St. Patrick's day and here is a post about Valentines .... As long as they all make it up at some point ....right?  Also, my computer crashed a few months ago and I lost all the pictures I had taken at this event.  To be honest it has taken me this long to be emotionally stable enough to post about it hahaha it was my first party that I have ever hosted and put on all by myself and I lost all documentation of it!!  Luckily my sisters brought their cameras and took plenty of pictures so all is not lost.  So all of these pictures are from Jens and Bethy with a couple that I took with my phone.

Anyway, this year I hosted a fun Valentine Tea at my town home in Provo.  Nora had been super concerned for a long time that she had never been to my house.  So I thought, what a great excuse to have a party at my house for a change!   I share my town house with 5 other people so I had to keep it simple, but I still wanted it to be special.  So I gathered all the Valentines-ish decorations I had to create a fun table scape.  I thank the heavens for my decorative vintage books all the time, they are great for any and all occasions!  I also was finally able to use the tea cups I had brought last summer at the Springville Antique Mall.  Mom brought special tea cups to drink out, of so I filled mine with rose petals and hearts and used them as decorations.  I did go to the dollar store to buy a few items to fill in such as dollies to create a runner down the middle of the table, I also found cute, decorative glass jars that I filled with cherry chocolate filled heart shaped marshmallows to add to our hot cocoa.  Bethy brought a few of her beautiful white tea pots and some of her fancy plates to eat on, which added to the elegance of the table.

I made special gluten free chocolate cupcakes to decorate each place setting and so each guest could have a  treat while they waited for everyone to arrive.  I was thrilled with how cute they turned out!

Here is the buffet.  We had {plenty of} cupcakes, cucumber and cheese tea sandwiches, a spring vegetable tray, heart strawberries and gluten free chocolate and lemon wafer cookies.

Bethy made these cute favors for everyone.  They had a box of conversation hearts, strawberry short cake gum and plastic rings.  I had made some heart shaped crayons for the girls and they were put in the favors as well.  I included pictures of the process at the bottom of this post.  I thought they were fun to make and look super cool!

For drinks we had hot cocoa, cherry seven up and an assortment of fruity herbal teas.  I had whipped cream and those gourmet marshmallows to put in your hot chocolate and cherries to add to your tea or seven up.  I wanted to have things that would seem super special to the little girls.  They loved the whipped cream and marshmallows, they had like three cups of cocoa each!

After lunch we went into my living room and watched The Princess and The Frog and made valentines to hang on my trees that I had left up after Christmas.  I had taken off all the Christmas decorations, I just loved coming home to the bright twinkle lights so I left them up as "winter trees" so we made decorations to turn them into "valentine trees."

It was such a fun little party!  I love celebrating Valentines Day, I think it is the most adorable holiday.  I'm glad all the Utah girls in my family could come celebrate at my house.  Since I live the furthest away I never get family visitors so I am glad they all made the long drive to come party at my house.

{Heart Shaped Crayons}

So easy to make, so fun to use!