Meanwhile back at Birdsong- yep, here comes MORE

Yes, I know, I'm still blathering on about our party.  It is a huge deal for me, and I love every minute of it. Plus,( just ask my family), it takes over my world for quite a while, so it is hard to let it go when it ends.

One of my favorite parts of the weekend is the party night. We drink some wine, eat dinner, shop in the garage, and hang out.  I try to keep it all pretty laid back, and fun for me too. So I cook ahead of time, making up huge pans of food in advance, to have frozen and waiting to go into the oven that night, and have the other vendors in charge of shopping.

This year was just a little more complicated when I started to set up the vendor space, because I forgot to use plastic on the walls when I hung a canvas up to paint a banner there this spring.  (the wall was a tad bit, uhmm, colorful)  I had to repaint  before I could fix the garage up and turn it into a store.  

I painted the wall a pretty sky blue (leftover from that banner), and wrote "peeps" in Xmas lights on it, then covered it all in a huge piece of lace. After carrying out typical garage junk, and bringing in some rugs, I set up tables with white cloths on them and we filled the room up with vintage goodness.

I'm afraid I didn't get any photos during the sale!  These are from set up before the room is done.

But here is a picture of what I bought there. This is a necklace from Lori.  

And here are the necklaces that Lori and Andrea gave to me.  I've always adored cameos.  And when Andrea told me to chose a necklace from her vendor table, I had to go for the one with the large bird that matched the bracelet kits she had.

I've been very inspired by both of them, and have been on a jewelry binge since they left. Here is a necklace I made from Andrea's kit. 

She included some very nice pieces, and I had some beads that matched nicely, and was able to add a bit more chain  and doo dads to make it longer.

Weeks before our weekend kicks off, I start baking and filling the freezer with treats.  I try to be very prepped in advance, so I can have fun once the party starts.  

Do you know how hard it is to live in a home that has a freezer full to the brim with treats????  Sometimes, when my husband would be out of town, and I'd still be up late in an empty home, watching TV or reading, I could hear the sound of those cookies calling my name from the freezer in the garage.  

Cookies can be very loud after midnight. They never shut up, when they know you are home alone and it is late at night.

Believe it or not, there were still cookies left in the freezer when the guests arrived.  I don't know how they survived, but some did.  

These were made with alphabet stamps I found at TJ Max.  I didn't notice till I was half done making them that I'd loaded "PEFPS" instead of "PEEPS" into the cookie cutters.  I was able to transform that F into an E with a knife point for some cookies, but many were already baked, so got served as "pefps".

We ended up with way too much food.  Besides the misspelled cookies, I made what Suzanne called a "bird bath full of apple deliciousness". I had kind of a huge bowl of it to serve.   Part of the problem, was that there was a storm right before I went grocery shopping, and the power was out! I had to push an over loaded 500lb cart in the darkness and browse by the light of my cell phone flashlight ap.

I wasn't as careful of a shopper as I could have been. But I think it's better to have extra than not enough.  

And boy did we have extra.

One thing that people seemed to like was the corn.  I'd fixed chicken pasta, and needed a side dish.  And I wanted something fresh, easy to make, and kind of Italian.

Here is what I did:

I cut the corn off of two dozen ears the day before, and stored it in ziplock bags in the fridge to save space.  When you are feeding 35 plus people for multiple meals, fridge space is a big issue.

My son chopped a bag of carrots in the food processor while my sis sauteed 3 diced red peppers in olive oil. Then the carrots were sauteed.  All of that went into a bag in the fridge too.

The next day, I emptied all the bags into a giant pot (I made way too much, thinking that 24 ears of corn for 35 people was okay, but I probably only needed half that much), added butter, sea salt, white pepper, and fresh thyme.

Then, I had anyone who walked through the kitchen taste it.  We all kept thinking, more thyme, more thyme, more thyme,  maybe more salt? By the time we all added thyme, it was pretty durn tasty.  

And wasn't I lucky that making something up on the fly worked out?  I'd never tried carrots with corn and thyme, but we all loved it. If it had sucked, I'd have been in trouble, since I had a vat of it and a bunch of hungry crafters!!