This is Part 2 in my mini-series about how to throw your own photo book party. You can catch up on Part 1 here.
The guest list was confirmed, the food prepared and the sangria chilling. (You didn’t expect us to work on our photo books on an empty stomach did you?) This may be a bit off topic, but we are talking about party planning right? I love taking food pictures so I thought I’d share them with you!
The Menu
Yummy empanadas. Great finger food while making photo books!
Mixed Green Salad with pear, blue cheese and candied pecans served with honey dijon vinaigrette
Tropical sangria dressed with some party supplies left over from Photo Book Baby’s pirate themed birthday party – why not?
I made the salad along with the candied pecans (super easy) myself, as well as the tropical sangria the night before, but I confess – the rest I bought or ordered. I don’t drink that often but the sangria was yummy. I made the pineapple syrup it calls for, though I’m not sure it was really necessary. It didn’t take long to make it though. One addition I made to the drink was canned lychees along with some of the juice. If you’ve never had lychee before it tastes like a cross between a pear and a grape. It’s very aromatic and I think it made the drink! We also had a cheese, cracker and fruit plate and white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. The girls also brought other snacks and desserts and there was plenty to enjoy.
The Party Begins
Here’s Charlene – a gracious host!
We were really lucky to have our party at my good friend’s Charlene Liang’s lovely loft office. Charlene is a successful and super talented Chicago wedding planner and owner of Sweetchic Events. She’s the first person I call to bounce party ideas off (including this one!) and she’s a fellow blogger. Her site is full of beautiful images of the most dreamy weddings plus she loves photo books like I do! She was the perfect partner in crime for this party. After we set up the yummy food – our guests started to arrive. After everyone grabbed a plate, I started to pass around my photo books. I fielded general questions about the types of books available, differences between photo book companies and some basic photo editing and design tips.
Showing one of my Mixbook cookbook/year in review projects. I look very serious don’t I?
As mentioned in my prior post, we were happy and fortunate to have Mixbook sponsor our party. Each guest received a $25 credit to use on any Mixbook product of her choice (plus promo discounts on top of that!) I approached Mixbook to sponsor our party for several reasons: I like their print quality, the many features of their software (fully customizable layouts), and the variety of free backgrounds and well designed clip art. If you want to read more, I’ve done several reviews of Mixbook’s products. You can find my Mixbook reviews here. All the latest photo deals including Mixbook deals are here.
We had a lot of fun and I got a lot of good feedback from friends afterwards about the party and what they ending up ordering in the end. One of my friends who got married last year made custom calendars and she said she liked the end product and software so much, she looks forward to making her wedding book with Mixbook! (by the way the BOGO calendar deal has been extended through the end of this month as well as the 40% off deal! Details at top of this page.)
Here’s more shots of the party, doesn’t everyone look so studious?
If you plan to have a photo book party of your own, one suggestion I would make is to ask everyone to upload the photos they plan to use before the party. Uploading photos can take quite a while depending on how many photos you’re trying to work with so uploading ahead of time will give folks more time to work on they layouts themselves.
The party was a lot of fun (see the smiling faces!) and I was so glad to get so many of my friends together in one room to work on our projects. In fact I’ve already had a request to have another one, but I think I need to recover from the holidays first!
Special credit and thanks to Donna L. for her awesome photos, warm thanks to Veronica and also hugs to all my friends Debbie, Angela, Rachel, Christina and Kat for braving the cold!
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This is a sponsored post and I am an affiliate of Mixbook which means I receive a referral fee if you click a link from my site and make a purchase. Regardless of any compensation, my opinions and thoughts are entirely my own.
what fun!