Hey Everyone,
Thank you for being awesome followers and viewer’s of my blog.
I’ve been fairly busy with Notefull Living, but not on my blog as much. Here’s an event I was a part of planning, since the fall of last year. It was fun to do something for the community.
Community is a big part of who I am. To help raise funds for the local youth is even better.
Our Friends run the local club and invited us last year to the fundraiser. We signed up to help for next year. When I saw the theme was western I knew to jump in and help. I was super excited to use my creative gifts. Here’s how it turned out.
By the way – I had an amazing team to help plan this. I’m looking forward to doing this again with them.
Here’s a glimpse at the stage Decor. We had a guitarist come play for the event and this was were he sat.
This blog post is just sharing the final results of the event. If you want a more detailed part of the process in how this was all put together comment below.
Stage
This was fun. We used what the church already had, wooden backdrop panels. It would have cost a lot extra to rent something for the backdrop. I got lots of beautiful plants from my husbands work. During our dried floral arrangement day we made huge arrangements for the stage. Plus to top off the Western look we had a local Riding Facility let us borrow a few saddles and tack for the event.
This saddle on the stage is actually sitting on my own personal tack stand. I could not get over how beautiful this saddle was.
Table Decor
This was great fun. I was insistent that the event have a level of Elegance to it. We had black table clothes. Jean cut out chargers under the wooden rounds. On the wooden rounds we made dried floral displays in vintage glass bottles with a variety of trinket like decor on the rest with beautiful octagon wooden signs.
Each table was similar but different. No 2 tables were exactly the same. I still can’t get over that the vintage bottles were from one of our team members. Her husband goes metal detecting and finds these. Probably from the gold rush days of our area. Some very OLD bottles.
Photo Booth
A huge part of the evening was the Photo Booth and a Cornhole Game. I don’t have a good photo of the Cornhole. It was handmade by someone and they were very well done.
I love how this space turned out. There was a huge line up for both things during the scheduled time they were available for guests. I love the dried flowers here!
One of my pairs of cowboy boots was here, and yes I do ride in these. I couldn’t believe how this came together. A team member from the youth ministry showed up with the huge metal tractor wheel at the time we set up. I was not expecting it, but it worked out super well.
Final Thoughts
As mentioned in the beginning this was a fundraiser for a local youth ministry. You can learn more about them with the following link.
https://www.eastfraseryounglife.com/about
If you interested in donating, you can find the link here:
https://www.eastfraseryounglife.com/donate
I also want to make mention of where the lovely saddles came from. If you don’t know, I work my day job as an Educational Assistant. I took time off the be a mom but I am back working in the classroom. I recently wanted to combine my EA skills and my love for horses and happened to learn about this place: https://discoveryequine.com/
I encourage you to check out the above links and learn more about the impact these places have for Youth in our day. It gives me hope for the difficult and confusing world we live in.
I hope you enjoyed a sneak peak into this fun community event.
I had a wonderful team that helped bring my vision board for this event happen. Thank You so much, you know who you are 😉
One last nugget to share. I have a second you tube channel where I share my Faith journey as a Christian. I tell more about my EA and Horse journey with the saddles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=KWfY2b2LuMQ
Carrie Plantinga
Home and Garden Blogger
If it seems like I was on a Vacation from blogging. That’s because I was just in Mexico with our whole family. This time last week we were heading back to the airport in Cancun to come back home to our very cold northern home in the Fraser Valley in Canada. It so happened to snow the week we got back.
This trip was a big first for me, I was just as nervous and excited as the kids.
Getting to our room was good and even though there was a time difference we settled in pretty quickly. We got there in time for the buffet for dinner. We really tried not to buy the airplane bistro food, knowing we were headed to an all inclusive was worth the wait for food.
It’s pretty easy to fall in love with the atmosphere there. I loved the scenery, the pools and especially the beach. We didn’t clue in to wake up in time to catch the sunrise until our last day there. This was what we caught just before the sun broke through the clouds.
Our family loved the ocean. Our boys were in and out of the water. We got our oldest for his birthday an underwater camera and we got some neat video of the fish in the ocean. My husband went snorkeling and got some video of the fish at the reef.
I learned a lot about going on a trip like this. My husband and I haven’t ever saved to go on one like this. We have focused and worked hard at buying a good family home in the Fraser Valley. Luxury trips like this weren’t an option.
There’s many stories and much more that I would share. There’s a more important post I will be doing about this trip once we get closer to summer.
We now have 3 kids. Thankfully our oldest son is mostly independent, I love watching him learn. Still teaching our second son to potty train (its rough) and our little girl, just loves to give lots of smiles and is super easy going.
I got a sunburn on our day, it was HOT out.
Notefull Living 