Celebrate Everything! Ice Cream Party

Festive Fridays

I was looking for some inspiration for a few parties that I’m planning this summer. We have one million family birthdays to celebrate, plus I'm dying to host a ladies’ night and a dinner party and…the list of things to celebrate is endless! I ordered a copy of Darcy Miller’s book Celebrate Everything! with low expectations. I mean, how many parties do you look at think “this is way too complicated to pull off” or “this is way too expensive to put together” or “this requires ordering things four months in advance and I am never going to be that organized!” But this book is honestly the best party planning book that I have ever seen.

Celebrate Everything! Ice Cream Party

It has entire party schemes that range from a golf-themed kids birthday to a formal 50th wedding anniversary party. For those events, she includes inspiration for everything from invitations to table decor to games to favors. She also has so many ideas that are based on simple things that you already own or things that require no money at all. For example, there’s a whole section in the book about how much personal toasts add to a celebration (a belief that I totally subscribe to!) and then all of kinds of prompts for toasts that lend some structure and make it easier for people to come up with quick ideas. Genius.

She also has entire chapters on really fun and easy ideas for decorating cakes or cupcakes for different themes, games for kids and adults parties and ways to put together every kind of bar-from s’mores to ice cream to cocktails. A bubbly champagne bar with toppings might be my favorite!

We were so inspired by all of her ideas that we decided to decorate for a run of the mill sleepover with her ice cream party theme. We took some of her suggestions and tweaked them for our space and the girls and I had a great time doing it impromptu one rainy morning. All we needed was balloons, brown craft paper, string, and lots of glue and tape. It took the whole party up a level of fun and we had so much putting it together. So many of her ideas were also very flexible-for example, she had put together cherries as wall decor, but since I wasn’t going to let anything touch my grasscloth wallpaper, we used painters tape to attach them to the chairs and it’s one of the cutest chairs decorations that I’ve ever seen. I can’t recommend this book enough.

Scroll through the images below to see what we put together!

dining area in a home with decorations for Ice Cream Party
home with decorations for an Ice Cream Party
balloon decorations near the windows
dining room with white dining chairs and colorful plate setting
balloons on a cone looking like Ice Cream Party decorations

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