For my Sweet 16 Party, I decided to throw a joint party with one of my best friends who has a birthday a month apart from mine. To make everything even, we're having it right in the middle of our birthdays. We decided our theme for the party would be Black and White. That means everyone has to wear black and white, and since its our special day, everyone has to be in semi-formal attire. The best part? My friend and I are wearing hot pink dresses with matching tiaras. Being 16, everything has to be exactly what we want and everything has to be aout us. For our party, we rented the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. (DCCA - a gallery with a huge party room in the front and galleries in the back) It has an artsy, industrialized feel which matches the black and white theme perfectly. We decided to invite about 70 of our friends. We looked for personalized invitations but nothing was quite perfect, so we decided to design and make the invitations ourselves. They neded up being black cardstock paper with gold and silver glitter in it, with a velum top sheet that had all the party info on it, tied together with a gold ribbon on the top. It took a lot of work to put them all together, but they were really cheap and we got so many comments on how pretty they were. The DCCA required you to have a caterer for your event, even  though we didn't want to have a dinner party. This ended up being great for us- the caterer we hired took care of the dance floor, linens, silverwear, and the food. The food is going to consist of chocolate covered strawberries and a bunch of other dessert finger-foods. Our table design took a lot of deliberation- did we want candles around? flowers? balloons? We decided to have round tables with black table cloths which went down to the floor, with a smaller, square white table cloth over it. For the center pieces, we found awesome blakc and white vases to put in the middle. To add some color, we're going to have bright colored confetti spread all around the table. We also wanted to have some things the guests could use, such as black and white mardi gras beads, disposable cameras, stick-on gem tattoos, and glow sticks. We also decided to hire a DJ. We made sure the DJ had a song list of songs we definatly wanted played, as well as one with songs we definatly did not want played. For something we can always have, we decided to have huge matted pictures of ourselves they people could sign. It is also really important to us that people who weren't invited don't get in to our party, so we're having a person outside checking everyone in. (after all, they weren't invited for a reason) When the guests walk in, they'll be greeted and the presents will go on two seperate tables, one for my friend and one for me. There are TV's around, so we're having a DVD slideshow of my friend and I growing up playing the entire night. The lighting is going to be dark, with white christmas lights as our main lighting as well as some lights the DJ is bringing. For our entrance, we're going to be escorted in by two handsome guys from either side of the gallieres with one of our favorite songs, possibly Journey's Dont Stop Believing.. It should be an amazing night, and it being only 3 weeks away, I can't wait!