An Afternoon Tea Shower

On Saturday, we celebrated my sister-in-law's upcoming wedding with an Afternoon Tea in The Lobby at the Peninsula Hotel. It was so much fun! My friend and I hosted a tea for a friend at The Drake a few years ago. I think that the Pen wins hands down.

This outing was planned a bit impromptuly, so I literally had to get invitations out overnight. I did a kamikaze run to Paper Source and, thankfully, found some AWESOME invitations with a tea pot on them. To off-set my DIY-Poser guilt for using store-bought invites, I bought some cards and labels to customize them a bit.

I wanted to do a "Two's Company, Tea's A Crowd" theme, but Andy intervened and wouldn't let me humiliate myself with such an awful pun. Hindsight being 20/20, I should probably thank him for that.

When we were on vacation last summer, my sister-in-law's celly was burnin' up with calls from her dude. I nicknamed her phone "The Hus** Hotline."

These are my favorite part of the invites. I cut a slit where the "lid" would open and "hung" a "HuskTea" bag from the inside the pot.

For favors, I picked up some small tins of Wedding Tea and tea bag rests from Crate & Barrel. I topped them off with blue and orange bikini-shaped sugar cookies from Sarah's Pastries & Candies. (This was a fun coincidence since she's having a blue, coral, and brown beach wedding in Florida.)

I used paper and labels from Paper Source to decorate the plain white bakery boxes from Sarah's.

I made menus by scanning the Paper Source invites, recreating the invite design, and mounting them to fit on front of square cards.

I then printed the menu on the inside. I was out of steam by the time I was working on these and kind of tossed the design together, but they turned out pretty cute.

The Peninsula staff had everything laid out for us when we arrived.

All of the food was delicious. It's amazing how finger foods can so painfully stuff you.

And the bride-to-be seemed pleased with her gifts.