Spin on Salads Party

When trying to come up with a creative spirit week for my ASB Leadership students at work, I gave them the idea of salad dressings as dress up days.  I created this classroom flyer to display the idea..

My students loved the idea, and I decided to make it my monthly dinner theme as well. On top of the dress up fun, a salad menu is always a perfect way to end summer, so this theme fit perfectly.

Invite: I designed the invite on Photo Shop changing the Ranch bottle to reflect my party details.  I included the dress up examples at the bottom to let my guests know exactly what I was asking them to wear to the party. If I were to make this invite again, I might have put these details on the back just to lessen the amount of words on the front.

Entry Decor:  I made this entry sign out of card stock and foam board.  The label I again edited in Photo Shop.  The "green salad" my 3 and 5 year old helped me make by cutting light and dark green tissue paper into pieces and crumpling it. We also added some yellow cheese shavings by cutting card stock.

Inside Decor: I stayed fairly simple (at least simple for me) with my decorations for this party. I set my table with a light green tablecloth, white plates, and dark green napkins. For my centerpiece, my kids and I created another tissue paper salad. For this one, I added red tomatoes out of scrapbook paper.

Also as part of the centerpiece, I made these vegetable vases and candle holders.  For the candle holder, I just removed the stem of the red pepper and fit the tea light candle on top.  You may have to shave some of the bottom of the pepper to make sure it stands up without tipping.  the vases are just red cabbage that I stuck skewers of vegetable flowers into.  Red, yellow, and orange peppers were cut to look like tulips and a mushroom was placed in the middle.  Flower radishes rounded out the look.  To cover the skewers, I used green onion!

My favorite idea I had for this party was to make the place cards look like mini salad dressing bottles.  I used travel-size nail polish remover bottles that I found at CVS.  I created the main label and the label on the lid with an image I found on Google and edited with Photo Shop.  I tried to think of salad-like words that described the guests to add with their names (i.e. zesty, sweet, spicy).  I printed these on sticker paper, so they were very easy to peal off and stick over the nail polish remover label.

For wine charms and napkin rings, I wanted to use real salad garnishes.  Radishes worked perfectly for my napkin rings.  I used a thick needle to string ribbon through the radishes and tied it in the back.

My wine glasses have various etchings on them (2 of each kind), so I needed two different charms to distinguish between each of the two matching glasses.  I decided on a crouton and a black olive!

Menu: Salads of course!!  One of my guests had the idea of everyone bringing a salad, so this is what we did.  All of them were delicious!  We had pasta salad, tomato/feta/cucumber salad, fruit salad, taco salad, bbq chicken salad (pictured above), and edamame salad.

I also found a neat dessert salad recipe to try - Snickers Caramel Apple Salad! I didn't take a photo of it at the party, so this photo is from the Chef in Training website where I found the recipe.  It was a neat pairing of rich chocolate and caramel mixed with the juicy sliced apples.

Favor:  I sent each guest home with homemade Italian Salad Dressing mix.  I washed out baby food jars (you need to have a container that seals like a jar or zip lock baggie) and spray painted the tops to add a bit of color.  I create this cute tag to attach designing it so that "Dressing" and "Mix" stood out a little bit.  I also gave each guest the recipe of what was in the jar and what they will need to add in order to make the dressing at home.

We had a great time as always.  Here is just a photo of some of us and our costumes...Blue Cheese, Ranch Dressing, and Thousand Island!