Valentine’s Dinner

I like to cook.  A lot.  I love the menu planning, the prep, the presentation and, of course, eating it.  One of my favorite things I do is cook for my homegroup a few times a year.  We had a Valentine’s Dinner last weekend and I wanted to show you what we did.  So fun!

First, I was inspired by my trip to NY where a lot of the window displays and store decorations where made out of old books.  So I bought this book at “the Boutique”  (that’s my code word for Value Village!).  I love old books and I kind of hate to tear them apart especially when someone like Vern J Cole has written in it claiming it as his own in that cool old fashionedy writing..

Ah well!  So I made invitations by tea-staining an old sheet I had.  I then printed out the invite on an iron-on transfer to the fabric and sewed it to one of the book pages.

For decorations, Lora and I made paper flowers out of tissue paper and some more pages.

We also made some lanterns out of sewing book pages together –

Now onto the food!!  Well, at least the soup.  I forgot to take photos of the rest of the food but the soup was my favorite!  Here’s some photos of the beet soup in progress (note: you might die from saturated color! Did anyone else hear me channeling Sue Shoop just then?  One day my mom will read my blog and see all these references to herself…)

I made a second soup – a pea soup and then we put them side by side.  Ben made it look pretty (he’s way better at that than me!) –

Kari took couples photos of everyone.  Here’s ours 🙂

And one last photo that I couldn’t resist posting…