Vintage Carnival Sale

Every year on Angie's birthday, she wants us to
bring out our big metal duck pond.  We bought it from a wholesaler called Design Legacy.  In the past, we just called the sale a "Duck Pond Sale" and put a percentage on the bottom of the duckies which told customers their discount.  Here is the pond.  It has a hose and a motor so they swim around.

This year, we decided to take the theme a little further.  My mom (Angie) said, wouldn't it be fun to have a little carnival this year?  (This was basically a hint to me to plan the whole thing so I got right to work.)  The first thing I needed was a cute invitation to mail to customers.  I can do the simple design stuff/word processor/blog/editing photos, but actually designing something that looks carnival-ish without being cheesy was beyond me.  I figured the best person for the job would be Sara Duckett of Sadie Olive because she designed our website and blog template and she is fast and reliable.  We highly recommend her!  Within about an hour after I described what I wanted, I received this in an email.

It was perfect!  Now that I knew that my colors needed to be red, white, and turquoise, I headed to Party City and got streamers, plates, napkins, and balloons.  I also got a disposable helium tank so we could have lots of balloons.  We can't ever have that many because they won't fit in our cars.  My next plan was to order cupcakes from Sams because you can get 30 of them for $12 and they are amazing!  The only thing I don't like is the crabby people that work in the bakery.  They are clearly not interested in helping customers.  The cupcakes turned out cute though!

My mom decided that we really needed a popcorn machine and a cotton candy machine.  She rented them both for the day with all the supplies for about $100 from True Value.

I had seen some water bottles covered with custom labels on ETSY so I decided to take the invitation front and print it on sticky paper so we could cover our bottles.

Last, our crafty employees, especially Kristin, made fun paper banners and drawings on our chalkboards.

As you can probably see, we had a lot of fun!!! 

Angie's son(left) (my brother) and his boyfriend Dustin came to help us use the machines

Here's the Birthday girl with both of her kids.

The sale was a huge success.  Several people got the one lucky duck in the pond with 30% off!  The cotton candy surprisingly wasn't all over our merchandise at the end of the day.  We fully expected a mess of frosting, cotton candy, and popcorn everywhere but it turned out to be pretty managable.  If you missed it, don't fret, Angie wants to have a Cowgirl theme next year for her birthday so get your boots and skirts ready!

-Lindsay