Seventeen Magazine Party

Hard to believe, but this past Monday, we celebrated 17 Years of Monthly Dinners!  Yes, I started hosting these parties seventeen years ago before some of us ladies were married or had kids! What a great 17 years it has been.  To honor 17 years, my theme was based around SEVENTEEN magazine.  The decor and meal were full of silly headlines & aspects of this magazine, so it was super fun to come up with what to do.

Invitation:  I found an image of the cover of Seventeen from October 2006 to use for my invitation since this is the month and year that I started hosting monthly dinners for my friends.  I then used Photoshop to change the taglines around Hilary Duff on the cover to represent things about my dinners as well as the party details.  For example, "204 Fun Theme Ideas" because this dinner was our 204th dinner, etc.

Decorations:  I used bright colors for my table because Seventeen magazine always uses bright pink or red as a focus color.  Kept the centerpiece simple with some beautiful and bright flowers in vases.

I wrapped each vase with two Seventeen magazine covers I printed out on my computer and then taped around the vase.  Simple.

For placecards, I asked each guest to tell me their celebrity crush.  I then printed out a photo of that celebrity as a magnet.  I created a Seventeen magazine style tag for each that read, "How to Be a Guy MAGNET & attract your Dream Man" for fun.  Hopefully you get the magnet play on words with this.

I used bright napkins and created a simple napkin ring with the Seventeen logo on it to wrap around them.

I found another issue of Seventeen Magazine to adapt for my menu.  Each item of the menu had a tagline around Jennifer Lawrence.  These took a bit of creativity to come up with and then to Photoshop onto the magazine image, but it was fun.

I used two more magazine covers to PhotoShop for my wine labels.  I found a Seventeen magazine cover that talked about a Massive SHOPPING Guide with style blogger's coolest pics and makeup deals, and changed it to a Massive WHITE WINE guide with wine blogger's coolest pics and wine deals.  

For the red wine, I used the Katy Perry cover that has The Best FALL CLOTHES for Your Body, and changed it to The Best RED WINE for Your Body.  The rest of the taglines on the cover stayed the same.

For wine charms, I printed out other Seventeen magazine covers.

Magazine Menu: As stated above, all menu item had a tagline on the Seventeen magazine cover I set on top of each plate at the table.  Our starter was a delicious cheese dip with crackers.  This went with the line, "Cheesy Pick-Up Lines - Don't Fall for that DIP."

For the main dish I served chicken legs that were really tasty.  They were easy to make and baked in the oven, so I didn't have to fuss with them too much.  The seasoning was so good, I made it again later in the week as well.  The tagline for this dish on the Seventeen menu magazine was "Get the Best LEGS ever! Look so tasty, he'll gobble you up!"  The original magazine, had "Best Jeans Ever."

The original Seventeen cover had 250+ easy hair ideas as a main tagline, so I had to think of a menu item that could somewhat go with that.  I decided on straight and curly French fries since hair can be curly or straight.  I purchased curly and regular fries and just popped them in the oven.  I didn't make them from scratch.

Taking some sort of beauty or health related quiz was always popular in Seventeen magazines, so I decided to incorporate a quiz into my menu as well.  My quiz tagline was, "Would you rather VEG out or go out?"  For vegetables, I served red, orange, and yellow peppers, zucchini, mushrooms that I grilled on the stove.

For dessert, I made Orange Crush Cupcakes.  The cupcake is only two ingredients -- a can of Crush soda and a box of vanilla cake mix.  The buttercream frosting had a few more ingredients, but was tasty too. I added a piece of orange slice candy to the top for added fun.  The tagline on my menu for these was, "Guy's Crush Confessions."

Favor: For the party favor, I had various skin and hair projects found in the travel section of Target.  I found a Seventeen magazine cover that had a bold tagline about hair and skin and simply printed up that part of the cover to use as a tag.

I am not sure if teens know anything about Seventeen magazine since it is only online nowadays, but this was a fun theme to play with.  It could easily be adapted for a teenager's birthday party and just change the magazine title if the teen is not seventeen.