D.I.Y. Northwest: House Warming Party

Good morning readers! I hope you had a wonderful weekend. Having finally felt ready to show off my pad and desperately wanting to get in some quality time with my favorite people, I hosted a little house warming soiree. As you may remember we recently painted our central wall a deep turquoise with a gold accent and we finally just put up some of the favorites of my man's record collection. To add a little drama to the living room I snagged this black and white Jackson Pollock print and framed it of course in gold....

My closest friends and family warmed the place up, including miss Ladybird herself and we received some amazing house warming gifts as well...

Entertaining expert Kelley Moore gave us the perfect Salt + Pepper shakers by Jonathan Adler. Jake and I not only have a serious affection for birds but we had been on the look out for Salt and pepper shakers for months. And working for Kelley has taught me how to be quite a swell hostess if I do say so myself...

Inspired by the color palette of our pad, my mom and I teamed up to put a personalized spin on the cupcake...

Starting by mixing the colors I wanted, I added white frosting to make the lighter shades of each hue. I'm no baker but the feathery dessert definitely made it feel like a party...

Of course it wouldn't really be a party without a signature cocktail (via Kelley's entertaining wisdom) so we took a stab at mixing one up and it was a huge hit...

The beauty of Sangria is that you can literally wing it with the proportions which is exactly what we did. We made our own minty simple syrup by boiling water and dissolving sugar in it then adding mint leaves. We put all the ingredients in in the above order and let it all soak for a few hours before the guests arrived, when we were ready to serve it up we popped the champagne and added it in. It was the favorite drink of the party and it was so much fun to have fruit to munch on at the end of every glass...Enjoy!