Last night we had our swim banquet for our high school team. Usually, we would have had the ‘Winter Sports Banquet’ at the school before now, however, this year we were on our own to do our own thing. The annual Winter Sports Banquet was cancelled due to a very scary event with our boys’ basketball team. The banquet was cancelled because of a game that had to be rescheduled to that specific night. So after that, there were no open nights for another banquet night…
I have to admit, I didn’t think it was actually going to happen although I had been planning it for over a month and a bit. I reserved a room at a pizza place and it was $13 a person. I wasn’t going to do centrepieces because so much was happening but I’m glad we did now. They were not grand and spectacular by any means but the kids LOVED them:)
The centrepieces were not hard to do but they took some time. If it weren’t for MyMatthew (our varsity swimmer) and SareBear (our younger swimmer) they wouldn’t have gotten finished as we had a medical emergency with my aunt yesterday morning bright and early!
We didn’t have extra money in the swim budget to do a whole lot. I looked through Pinterest and there were a lot of extravagant pieces but as I said, time and money were not on our side. The one thing that I ALWAYS love using for anything is my mason jars. I am a huge mason jar fan. They’ve always been a part of my life whether it was drinking out of them, canning food, or putting water in them and putting my little clover flowers in them ( <3 ), I use those and tin cans anytime I get a chance.
Over this season, we have accumulated many pictures on our swim team’s Facebook page. Some were from cell phones, but a lot of the were taken by one of our parents who is a wonderful photographer. I got permission to print them all off. Walgreens had a 50% off coupon on all prints for the week – I lucked out! I went to the grocery store and bought bamboo skewers. I already had blue tissue paper and black and Vegas gold ribbon at the house.
We put the blue tissue paper into the mason jars and scotch taped pictures onto the skewers. I added a little piece of styrofoam in the middle of the blue tissue paper to help keep the pictures in place. Then I tied the black and gold ribbons around the top of the jars.
I had other plans to bring the blue tissue paper that we used inside the mason jars to put underneath, but I forgot that at home:( After being at the hospital all morning and getting these done right before we walked out of the door, I felt I was doing great just getting there! Even though I stressed about it, I do not think the kids even noticed:) They were so excited looking through all of the jars for their pics:)
Even after all of the pictures we used in the jars, I had a lot left over, so I whipped out a piece of poster paper and stuck the rest onto that. Again, the kids loved seeing themselves everywhere! It didn’t matter to them that it wasn’t ‘decorated to the 9’s’. They were just happy to be there together, eating pizza, getting their awards and seeing their season in pictures:)
I guess sometimes, Less *IS* More 
Speak soon!
take care,
~kat
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