My busiest part of this holiday season has passed...last weekend on Friday and Saturday night I lead children's crafts for the Candlelight Christmas Tours at Historic Locust Grove in Louisville and on Sunday I decorated for the Jane Austen Society of North America- Greater Louisville Region's December Tea.
The children's crafts were great fun and messy :) The kids got to make a cinnamon applesauce (made with just cinnamon and applesauce) ornament, evergreen and rosemary (organic from my garden) sprigs ornament, and fruit print and letter stamp Christmas card (not pictured). It smelled wonderful too with the cinnamon, evergreen and rosemary wafting around the room...it smelled like Christmas :)
For the December Tea decorations, I based my design on the theme from this year's JASNA Annual General Meeting, which was "Sex, Money, and Power in Jane Austen's Fiction." Our region focused on "Lady Susan" this year, so I also added elements from our study on Jane's only epistolary novel. The color scheme was white, yellow, red, grey, and black. Some greenery was added to bring holiday cheer :)
I have many decorating items at my disposal and procured several new items to add to the specific design. I also included hand-made paper origami flowers (lilies), which were gifts to all the attendees for coming to the event.
I had letters from "Lady Susan" enlarged at Office Depot to hang around the room to help fill the space and tie in the decor theme. My wonderful, crafty husband built the wooden stands that allowed me to hang the letters.
To safely add to the lighting in the room, I added LED tea lights in votives and LED candles.
We also celebrated Jane Austen's birthday with a toast. I hand painted a special birthday sign that my wooden Regency man held as he greeted all the attendees.
It was a lovely event!! Our JASNA National President, Iris Lutz, spoke on "Houses in Jane Austen's Fiction," which was a fantastic tour of Jane's homes in England and houses that Jane may have modeled her "parks" and "cottages" after in her novels.
If you have any questions about these decorations or would like some ideas for your next party/event decor, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email, mariaroseaprimecollection@gmail.com. I'm happy to help!