English Garden Tea Party

Host the most lovely garden party of the season, and treat your bride to an impeccable English Garden Tea Party themed bridal shower. Complete with delicate finger sandwiches and an assortment of fragrant teas, guests will enjoy sampling classics like cucumber sandwiches, biscuits and Earl Grey, along with a few delectable surprises for your guests to enjoy.

Find a local bakery to prepare delicious cream cakes, scones, cookies and tiny muffins. Consider bringing in an etiquette expert to explain the traditions of participating in a high tea, and dispel the notion of pinking lifting once and for all!

Another memorable touch to make your bridal shower unique is to host the shower outdoors, as an extravagant garden picnic. Borrow several croquet or badminton sets, and plan to play a mini tournament or as teams. Challenge your guests to speak with a British accent, and capture the moments on camera. We've seen some amazingly fun movies that are created from all of the events leading up to the bride's special day, and played in an entertainment center during the reception.

Send guests home with a collection of specialty teas and quality chocolates tucked into a beautiful teacup. Mismatched teacups are easy to find at resale and antique shops at a very reasonable cost, and look so pretty displayed on a round table, dressed in English Garden inspired linens at the party.

If the bride is a tea enthusiast, she most likely has a tea set, china, a teapot or other accoutrements on her registry. A wonderful gift to present to her at the English Garden tea party bridal shower would be her entire tea or china set, as a gift from the entire group of guests.

Feeling that a traditional Tea Party may be a little too refined for the bridal shower you're planning? Kick it up a notch and inject some lightheartedness into the concept by hosting a Mad Hatter Tea Party!

Mad Hatter Tea Party

Send out invitations instructing guests of the festive affair, and ask them to dress up, dress flamboyantly, wear crazy hats – the more fantastically over-the-top, the better for this event! Be certain to include a note on the invitation saying "Please wear your maddest hat". Have a few extras on hand, in case a guest forgets to bring one.

The Mad Hatter Tea Party bridal shower is absolutely unconventional in nature, so don’t anticipate spending a lot of time having guests participate in “normal” bridal shower games. To start, everyone must remember to change seats every half hour.

One of the favorite parts of a Mad Hatter Tea Party themed shower is the Hat Parade and Contest. Once everyone arrives, the guests parade around in their celebratory attire, and showcase the crazy hats they have found or made especially for the party. Prizes are given for a few categories, like Most Impossible To Balance, and Makes You The Tallest When Worn. Obviously, feel free to make up appropriate categories that best fit your event.

An easy game for the Mad Hatter Tea Party is "Who Is The Queen Of Hearts". Place a shuffled deck of cards into a hat. Ask each guest to draw one card, until a guest draws the Queen of Hearts. A beautiful red rose goes to the winner!

If your Mad Hatter bridal shower party is outdoors, think about how fun it would be to have a Teacup or Teaspoon Relay Race! Yes, it sounds a little juvenile at first, but that's exactly what a Mat Hatter Tea Party is supposed to be! Divide guests into teams of two, or more. Each participant must transport a teacup full to the brim with water from one end of the course and back without spilling a drop! If you have a lot of guests attending the shower, consider having the teams go back and forth, cycling through several team members. The team with the most amount of water remaining at the end of the allotted time wins! For a Teaspoon Relay, have guests balance raw eggs or jellybeans on a teaspoon as they run through the course.

Other fun "Through The Looking Glass" inspired touches could include cupcakes, with EAT ME written across the top. Tie tags that say DRINK ME around glasses or tied to tea cups. With a little extra time and crafting skills, the perfect flamingo croquet set would definitely become the stuff of bridal shower legends.

For centerpieces, try using Styrofoam plates and dowels to create what looks like towering stacks of balancing plates. Decorate with a huge assortment of teapots and tea cups – as mentioned earlier for the English garden party tea party, discount stores (like Marshalls/TJMaxx), resale shops, yard sales and antique centers are great resources to find inexpensive, mismatched china for decorating and favors.