A neighborhood Dinner Party Club set out to host a Beunas Noches themed birthday party with lots of DIY elements and vibrant colors! With Cinco de Mayo right around the corner, I’m loving all the fiesta inspiration in this party. Some of my favorite elements? Repurposing old glass Coca Cola bottles as vases, setting up a taco bar for a themed dinner, and mixing in colorful tissue paper pom poms with string lights!

Read on for lots of DIY ideas, fiesta inspiration, and more party photos…

PARTY DETAILS, as told by Emily…

Theme Inspiration:

A friend and I started hosting a Dinner Party Club within our group of friends. It gives us a chance to not only have a fun party with good food and friends, but style, cook and photograph to our hearts content. This party’s theme was a late summer fiesta. Beunas Noches was the title we went with, choosing to celebrate early in September while the weather was still beautiful in Ohio. My friend Hannah hosted at her beautiful home, and we set the stage on the back patio.

Details + Decorations:

All of the details and decorations were items we either had on hand, thrifted or created ourselves. Our place settings included glass Coke bottles we started saving a month in advance and then filled with small plastic pinwheels, DIY Shrinky Dink mustaches I crafted the afternoon of the party and little pennants with each guest’s name in silly Spanglish to assign seating for the party. (we think through every little detail, down to how to sit guests for best interactions during dinner, taking into account the ratio of male-to-female attendees) We used bangles and bracelets of all different styles and colors as large napkin rings, and we filled these with napkins, eating utensils, and sparklers for after dinner fun.

Each seat was covered in a brightly colored shawl or South-American inspired vest and a sombrero. The gentlemen were gracious and strung lights and DIY tissue pom-poms above the tables, as well as stringing a bandana bunting (tied-together bandanas) around the back patio door.

Food:

For our menu, we embraced the end of summer and all of its glorious fresh produce with homemade Sangria, fresh garden tomato salsa, a taco bar, and meaty chili, all garnished with limes and fresh Cilantro. We served Coronas, Mexican Coke-a-Cola and lemonade in a red cooler from the 1950’s, with paper umbrellas and fresh citrus fruits as garnish. For dessert there were just out of the oven sopapillas and s’mores by the fire on the back deck.

 After supper we had a pinata filled with candy, played with sparklers and took photos with the ‘faux-staches’ before starting our bonfire and ending the evening conversing, wrapped in warm blankets sipping our drinks.