My Favorite things party (on the cheap)

For our January Relief Society Enrichment activity, we had a "My Favorite Things" party.  There are so many awesome ideas on Pinterest - you can find pretty much any printable download you desire!  We needed to make this party cheap, so I modified it a little.

First, we made it a brown paper bag theme.  We bought brown wrapping paper from the Dollar Store and wrapped cardboard boxes and put "Brown paper packages, Tied up with string. FRIENDS are a few of my Favorite Things".  We set those on the front table. We covered the "treat" table with a cute brown and red checkered wrapping paper, and would have covered our other table, but ran out :(  

We had a popcorn bar for our treat.  I brought my popcorn maker, and we had quart sized plastic bags that the ladies put their popcorn in.  (not cute, but it was a good way for the butter not to leak through, and they were able to shake up the fun popcorn mix that they had made) We had mini m&ms, sugar babies, skittles and red hots as candy mix-ins and ranch, butter and white cheddar seasonings that they could sprinkle on the popcorn.  I meant to bring cinnamon and sugar, but I forgot.  Popcorn with butter and cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on it is YUMMMMMY!  To keep with the brown paper bag theme, I cut brown lunch sacks in half, and that is what we used to put the candies in.  Cheap and simple!  We also put nametags so that the ladies could easily see what there was to put on their popcorn. 

popcorn bar

 

upclose look at popcorn bar items

 

 At the end of the popcorn bar, we had water bottles with a Wyler's light or Crystal Light tied to them with this quote, downloaded from Pinterest.

As the women came in, I had them fill out a little card that had 3 questions.  What is your fav book or movie, what is your fav treat, and where is you fav place to eat at.  They put this in a popcorn bucket, and we used them later for a game.  After filling those out, they were able to head to the popcorn bar.

To start off the night, I shared some quotes about getting to know each other so that we can be more inspired to help the ladies in our ward.  And some quotes about opening ourselves up so that others can know us well enough to help us when we need it. That is where the water bottle quote comes into play.

After that, I had each woman share her favorite item that she had brought.  After 4 women had shared, I pulled 3 or 4 cards from the popcorn bucket and the ladies had to guess who had written what.  I had homemade zucchini bread for the person who guessed the 4 names correctly before anyone else. (I had made about 7 individual sized zucchini breads)

It was a very fun night, listening to the stories behind the favorite things that were shared, and seeing the connections made as ladies learned more about each other.

At the end of the evening, each woman went home with a party favor.  This is the biggest difference from the fav things parties I had seen on Pinterest.  Instead of the women bringing 5 or 10 of their fav thing to share with the others at the party, we just had them bring the one. And instead, they went home with a party favor (in a brown paper sack) that had some chocolate, some mints, a neat quote on friendship by CS Lewis, a list of fav couponing sites, 2 recipes, and a home made cookie from one of the recipes.  Easy and cheap -  nothing to scream about, but its always fun to go home with something.  The printable on the bag says "These are a few of my favorite things".

 

 

This was a fun night!  And I didn't mention that we invited the Young Women to this night.  It was a fun way to get to know them, and for them to get to know the Relief Society ladies (and realize that we do fun things, too!)