outdoor cinema party

nothing makes me happy like a good old fashion movie night, and combined with way too many hours spent drooling over irrelevant wedding blogs and appropriately themed pinterest searches, i decided that i needed to host my own outdoor cinema bonanza for my birthday.

most of the furniture and decorations were essentially dragged from the house and scattered over the lawn in a bit of a lounge room relocation scheme. the carpet was collected from a flooring company who were throwing it out - for reasons we don't question, and we stocked up on extra cushions from lifeline, with scrap material covers for aesthetic and personal hygiene purposes. 

the bottle wall was a bit of a project i'd been wanting to do for a while, so with generous donations from friends as well as a dumpster-diving expedition at the local rsl, there were enough bottles and jars to make a recycled curtain captain planet would be proud of. in the beginning, the bottles made lovely sounds in the breeze, but it went pretty rapidly downhill when the string started fraying and the bottles smashed onto the brick pavers.

hats must go off to the awesome talent that captured this event: mum and emily who took photos and andy who filmed the video (he doesn't have a site for his work, but we won't hold that against him). also the family, who helped cook and craft many of the pretty things from the night, and endured my ceaseless distress about the weather and what movie should be screened. and my sister who let me have my party on her birthday.

 

 yep. handmade popcorn boxes. don't ask me why i decided it would be a good use of a perfectly decent part of our lives to make these – it seemed like a good idea at the time...

how the monumental wooden frame stayed upright for the entire night is a miracle in itself...probably the shonkiest structure on the planet, it very nearly snapped in half when we went to lift it up. dad says 'it has character'. that's what he says when he can't really be bothered to do a job properly, but it's kind of perfect.

these bottles may look amazing, but i can think of many other ways to describe them after scrubbing the trademark 'coke' logo off about 100 of them, using only paint stripper, steel wool and a couple of disgruntled younger sisters...