A couple of weekends ago, I hosted a 'Baby Welcome' party to a beautiful little fella, the son of a very good friend of mine.
I challenged myself to running an eco friendly party! And I used the products from the Eco Kids Party Food Supplies bundle and the Eco Kids Party Decoration bundle, available on Plastic Free Baby.
The 100% cotton bunting was the first thing to go up (I did it the night before, while Finn my son was sleeping... it would have been a bit chaotic to try doing it with him around, for fear of entangling him!). The red gingham bunting framed the kitchen beautifully for the party, and instantly gave a party vibe.
I used a few biodegradable balloons in the corners of the kitchen too, which topped the decoration off nicely! They are made of natural latex, which is an organic material that is completely biodegradable. It feels completely like normal balloons in every way, from blowing up to hanging. I hung them with some natural twine from my garden shed. And Finn had a good time playing with the balloons in the days afterwards too (much to my distress - I have a bit of a balloon phobia!), then we popped them into our home compost.
So once the decorations were sorted, I moved onto the table setting. Of course I didn't want to use ANY single use plastic for the cutlery and plates. The Turtle Straws (100% plastic free, biodegradable and hold their shape better than paper, made of wheat!) were a good talking point, although did get confused with the bread sticks that I had stupidly put right next to them! We used bamboo cutlery where needed for food (100% organically grown bamboo), wheat fibre bows and plates for the food that my kinds guests had brought with them for the party, and for the sweet dishes using the cute little colourful compostable Ice Cream spoons - also getting us into a discussion about the trials and tribulations of home composting! ;-) We even used some of the used wheat fibre plates to do some hand prints and finger painting with all the children at the party!
I think that there's still a lot to be done by industry to look at the single use plastics involved in food packaging - at this party we did serve up a lot of food that had arrived in single use packaging, but I think to an extent this is really rather hard to avoid unless you have a plastic free pantry / food shop on your doorstep (which most of us don't). The world has a long way to go in reducing the tendency to wrap everything we buy from the supermarket in plastic... but that's for another day...
So overall, the Baby Welcome 'eco' party was a success which I can build on for future gatherings!
Thanks to all my guests who were happy for me to write this blog, and thank you to them all, as my very dear friends, for being so supportive of my endeavours in setting up this shop.