Garage Graduation Party

My daughter graduated from high school in May 2010 and we had a graduation party for her! While planning the party and looking at various ideas online, the majority of them that I found (and all the good ones) were in blog posts!

This past week, I have received a couple of phone calls from friends who have children graduating this May -- they were inquiring about some of the things we did for our party. So I thought this might be a fun blog post in case anybody is ever searching for ideas.

I am putting in a lot of the details, so it is a bit wordy but I remember when I was searching for ideas, how much I appreciated those very informative posts!

In the area where we live, each graduate (from every high school in every town!) has their very own party, usually an "open house" style and it is held for approximately 2-5 hours. Graduation is held on Sunday afternoon and the parties are held all over town. They are held on the weekend beginning Friday and occur at all hours -- in the morning, late morning, early afternoon, late afternoon and evening. Invitations are sent out and friends, relatives and families go "party hopping" from one to the next.

So, last year was finally our turn. I had been kinda sorta planning it my head for about a year or two after scoping out the parties I attended the previous two years. Then a few months ahead of time, K and I started to seriously plan it. Since it was her party, I wanted her to decide what we were doing. I had 'big' ideas -- and she wanted simple and understated. I wanted to hold it inside the house (late May can bring some crazy weather) and she wanted it in the garage. The garage?! Ick! That thought had not occurred to me, but she explained that she preferred garage parties because they are "open" and "easy to approach" and nice and casual. Ok, garage it was!

We decided to hold ours on Friday from 5 - 8 pm. Since the majority of them are held on Saturday and Sunday, we thought it would be nice to hold K's a little early so she could attend the other parties for her classmates over the weekend.

First things first: clean out the garage. Because our home is for sale, some of this cleaning/purging had already been done. I've never had the pleasure of parking my car in the garage because Hubby is very particular about his garage and for a long time, we kept a couple of older 'collectible' cars in the garage. The garage had many items hanging on the walls like personalized license plates from previous years and some cool lights and quite a bit of Harley-Davidson stuff. I don't have any photos of what it used to look like before all that was taken down, but here are some exciting shots of how it appeared before I started getting it ready. As you can see, hubby no longer was as picky about it as he had the garage at the new house by now.

Lucky for me, we also have a large barn on our acreage, so most of the clutter was moved over there to get it out of the way. I was saving boxes to use as I packed up household belongings from the house for sale to move to the new one.

I cleaned that garage floor at least a half dozen times! By the time I was done with it, you could eat off of it.

K planned her menu: Roast beef sandwiches, a pasta salad, individual bags of chips, strawberry shortcake and punch were her priorities. She didn't want the traditional decorated cake with frosting (which is my favorite -- but I ate plenty of cake at all the other graduation parties!).

I work for a community college with an amazing food service department and that is who I approached to make all the food for us. They did a fantastic job! I gave them the menu, date and time and the approximate amount of guests we expected and they did all the rest. All I had to do was pick it up earlier in the day and serve it at party time!

We had a "candy buffet" at the party. While reading other blogs, I saw some beautiful candy buffets at weddings and loved the idea! I thought of having candy in jars in the blue and green colors that K had picked for her party but then decided to only put out wrapped candy. A garage setting just didn't seem appropriate for using scoops in glass bowls and apothecary jars.

So the key for the candy to grace our candy buffet was it had to be wrapped and colorful. I picked up 100 small-sized paper bags in black and gold (school colors) and found stickers that said "Class of 2010" and stuck those to each bag.

Just before the party started, we opened the garage doors. Tables against wall are two card tables holding the dessert and punch.

Food tables are below the "Happy Graduation" sign. White table held plates and utensils. Blue table held all the food. Green bowl in corner for bags of chips. Displays of photos on wall.

Placemats lined up on table to make runners. Flower pots holding flowers and photos.

K's display table with her awards, trophies and accomplishments.
(We added balloons to the basket on left to hide wall heater.)

Candy Buffet. Black and gold bags to hold candy on the shelf. Candy was held in a various assortment of containers.

Table at entrance held a guest book and graduation photos. Wallet sized graduation photos to take and a basket to hold congratulatory cards. The display above was a photo from each year of her life, including all the school photos.

I also made some personalized candy using Hershey's nuggets wrapped with tiny labels that had K's photo, the name of the high school and graduation year on it. Again, I saw these in photos of a wedding on another blog and googled the directions and made my own template. They print onto a sheet of address labels which wrap perfectly around the candy.

The candy buffet was a huge hit! The parents who have called me this week were asking specifically about this aspect of our party and the personalized chocolates.

(This photo is not mine but one I found on google last year when I was searching for personalized graduation ideas. This became my inspiration and our candies looked very much like this):

Beginning in January of 2010, I began to search for decorations and items that were blue and green. I managed to find everything I needed in our town and the surrounding towns and everything was very inexpensive. I picked up plastic table coverings in blue and green and found some plastic planters for the tables. While in Walmart one day, I came across some woven placemats in the exact colors and bought a dozen of them at 99 cents each! I put four of them together on each table to look like a runner and put the others on the tables holding the food. I picked up blue and green plastic serving bowls to hold items such as individual bags of chips and some of the candy. The paper plates and napkins were blue and green as well.

For wall displays, I printed out dozens of photos of K growing up and of her many school activities. I tried to get as many of her classmates in the photos as well. Using clear photo corners, I put the photos onto heavy black poster boards. We were able to attach each poster board to the walls using thumbtacks.

A week earlier, I picked up Gerbera Daisies in bright colors at the local nursery. They also gave me the little plastic picks that hold the cards. The daisies were put into the blue and green pots and set on the tables. I used the picks to put some of K's wallet-sized graduation photos back to back and stuck them in the flowers.

We had a handful of tables I was able to use for the food and dessert table. I borrowed a couple of friends, too. For the seating inside the garage, I was able to borrow two tables and some wooden chairs from friends who used to own a restaurant and they kept these for family gatherings.

The tables were covered with heavy, plastic lined tablecloths I purchased from the college. I picked up a few extras in case they became soiled and needed to be changed out during the party.

K used a small area in the garage for her awards, trophies and other accomplishments from high school.

About a week ahead of time, I was ready to roll! Garage was set up and decorated for the most part. We added the tablecloths and flowers that morning. Our back deck was also used and more flowers were placed outside. 

When the day arrived, it rained in the morning! I did have a back-up plan to move everything into the house if needed. But by early afternoon, it cleared up, the wind died down and by 2 p.m., it was gorgeous outside! As a matter of fact, the wind had stopped completely. We turned on the fans to keep the food cool and clear of any bugs that might find their way inside and eventually had to put one outside as the gnats decided to crash the party outside. It is a very rare occasion in Iowa that we actually have to create our own breeze!

At 4:45, we opened the garage doors. Party started at 5 p.m. and almost immediately, cars started to roll onto our property. The next 3 hours flew by and we had so much fun!

Trying to figure out how much food we needed was the biggest dilemma. Because we were having our party on a Friday evening and only 2 or 3 other parties were also being held at that time, I thought we may get a larger crowd. But if the weather was bad, we could have a smaller crowd. We finally decide to plan on enough food for 150 people. I would much rather have too much food than not enough.

We ended up with about 225 people that evening! And I had almost exactly 1/3 of the food left. The strawberry shortcake was almost gone and we did run out of strawberries at the very end.

I wish I had taken more photos of everything before the party started. We gave my camera to a friend who was helping us out and he took many, many photos but none of the food, etc.

Overall, I think we planned it well and stayed within our budget and everybody had a great time!

Thanks for visiting my blog!

I will be linking up with:

Seasonal Sundays at The Tablescaper
Home Sweet Home at The Charm of Home
Metamorphosis Monday at Between Naps on the Porch
Amaze Me Monday at Dittle Dattle
Tabletop Tuesday at A Stroll Thru Life