This Little Women Picnic Is An Ideal Garden Theme Party!

A garden theme party is a perfect way of celebrating summer and gives you and your friends a chance to share your food preparing talents! It can be thrown at the end of the summer school break as an excuse to get together with all your friends before school starts up again!

Ladies will also enjoy this party or it can be a theme for a teenage birthday party. A way of celebrating the completion of a literature symposium or book club is another excuse to host a party with this theme.

Garden Theme Party Itinerary

Party Budget: $135

Feel free to adapt your own itinerary, or use ours:

11:00-Guests arrive with their contributions to the party
Noon-Lunch
1:00-Games
         Judging
3:00-Winners of the contests announced
4:00-Guests depart

Garden Theme Party Food

Menu

Finger sandwiches
Fruit salad
Veggie tray
Pies that the girls bring
Iced tea
Lemonade

A garden theme party is best thrown as a structured potluck. Assign each of your guests to a menu item.

As your main course will be finger sandwiches, have each girl bring a different kind of finger sandwich so that there is a variety. 

To make this kind of sandwich, make a normal sandwich and of off the crust. Don't forget to serve them on a fancy tiered-dish.

If you intend to have a pie contest, you and your guests should make pies to share as well.

Also have each guest bring one of the sides. In the end, then, each girl should bring a finger sandwich tray, a side, and a dessert.

This not only takes a lot of the cooking off of the hostess, but also lets your guests share their abilities in the kitchen!

Strawberries, bananas, blueberries, grapes, and almost any other fruit work well in a fruit salad. Some of the best fruit salads are also made with whipped cream either stirred in or on the top.

Depending on how many guests you have, you can also request a separate melon salad. Melons do not taste very good in the other fruit salad. Whipped cream, likewise, does not quite jive. 

Another excellently appropriate side would be a veggie tray. Don't forget to serve it with ranch dressing!

Your garden theme party could hardly be complete without iced tea, fruit punch, and lemonade. Have a guest or yourself take care of these drinks. Serve them either in a punch bowl or a glass dispenser.

Be sure to provide pretty plates for the food as well. Presentation does matter. A nice touch to serving the food is to have quotes from literature that correspond with the food.

Garden Theme Party Feeling

Shopping List:

• Pillow decorations
  
• Streamers and balloons
• Red and white checkered tablecloths
• Pretty plates
• Ribbons for prizes
• Handkerchiefs or rope (enough for the three-legged race)
• Burlap sacks or pillow cases (pillow cases are easy to find at second-hand stores)
• Two pairs of wooden knitting needles
• A medium hoop for embroidery 
• Louisa May Alcott prizes
• Food 

Soft greens, blues, yellows, and pinks along with florals should dominate your decorating. Buy pillows from thrift stores that contain these colors. Also use streamers and balloons to decorate, even if it isn't a birthday, who doesn't like decorations?

To give a picnic feel, use red and white checkered tablecloths for the tables. Be sure to have a sandwich table, a salad table, and a drink table. A place to display any other competitions should be prepared as well.

Have your guests bring bouquets from their yards and use them to decorate at the party. These bouquets can either be used as prizes for the games or be brought back home by the girls that brought them.

The attire is also very important to your party. If you are making going for a Little Women feel, have the girls dress as a character from the book. Another idea is to give the girls different time periods to dress like.

This will bring a variety of eras to your garden theme party. Regency era can give your party a Jane Austen slant while pioneer days will bring in Laura Ingalls Wilder. Anne of Green Gables is another novel that can set the stage for your garden party.

Garden Theme Party Fun

Fun games for this party include a pie contest, a three legged race, a sack race, musical chairs and grace.

As mentioned above, the pie contest entails having each guest bring a pie. Choose two judges that will taste each pie and announce the winner. Only homemade pies may enter!

The bouquets also can be judged. As a prize, the winners can either be given blue ribbons or receive one of the bouquets. Prizes could also include classical novels, era themed gifts, or small plants like succulents.

Girl's should be encouraged to share any feminine accomplishment. They can bring their painting, crocheting, or sewing projects to be judged as well. These can be judged as in an open show category. 

For your three-legged race you will need either a rope or use a handkerchief to tie the feet together. Mark a beginning and end point and let the girls race. Remind them that coordination gets you farther than speed!

For the sack race, you can use either burlap sacks or pillow cases. (Pillow cases are easy to find at second-hand stores.) Use the same course as the three-legged race so that you don't need to set up two courses.

Musical chairs is another great game for this party theme. Play mellow, garden-like music. And don't forget croquet another garden party favorite!

How To Play Grace

Grace is a game that is so named because it is supposed to prove how graceful you are. For this game, you will need two pairs of wooden knitting needles and a medium hoop for embroidery. Decorate your hoop to coordinate with your party colors and patterns.

To play, the first player puts the hoop on her pair of knitting needles and crosses the needles. Leaning forward and taking a step as though to move her skirt hoops out of the way, she pulls the needles away from each other, flinging the hoop in the air.

The second player tries to catch it with her needles and tosses the hoop back the same way. There isn't really a winner to this game. It is just fun.