Froctober Edition I

Welcome to the first edition of Froctober!.

Today the special event I will be sharing Tips, Tricks and Pics from is an African Jewelry Party my friend Bethany and I held in July. By hosting an African Jewelery party you are raising awareness and funds for a truly wonderful organization in Uganda. The Organization is called Operation Uganda and you can read about them here. The three pillars of their organization are:

Rescue a Child – There are over 2 million orphaned and vulnerable children in Uganda through child sponsorship and the rescue fund we are able to rescue and care for orphaned and vulnerable children.

Empower a community – After years of war aids and extreme poverty local communities in Uganda have suffered. Operation Uganda empowers communities through skills based training, education and child sponsorship.

Transform a nation – one child at a time, one widow at a time, one community at a time. Together we can transform a nation and help the poorest of poor out of poverty, one at a time.

One of their empowerment programs is teaching women how to make jewelry and other crafty items. Then they ship the handmade jewelry overseas so that people can buy the products, and raise funds for Operation Uganda. This is how an African Jewelry Party comes about, people decide to host one, invite their friends along and a Jewelry consultant will come out on the day with all the products as well as a DVD and give a short presentation about the organization.

We decided to have the party at Bethany's house as most people we were inviting were friends of hers. And because, Bethany would like to actually go to Uganda to visit Operation Uganda in the not too distant future. Ok now its time to share some Tips, Tricks and Pics of this special event.

PICS

Here were some of the awesome handmade products the consultant brought along.

Ha, excuse the messy icing but they got squashed and smudged on the way to Beth's house.

These were some other designs (pre packaging)

TIPS

1. If there is a particular cause or organization that you would love to raise money for or raise awareness about then I would suggest looking around on the internet to see if that particular organization has a "get involved" section set up for people who want to raise awareness/funds. Operation Uganda were fabulous, they sent us invitations and gave us the details of the jewelry consultant they would send to us. They supplied all the products, methods of payment and gave the presentation about their work at the party. All we had to do was provide the location and some afternoon tea. This eliminated a lot of work for Bethany and I. 
2. As you can see the cookies I decorated got a little smudged in transit, I was trying to have less to carry by putting as many as I could in a container. I would suggest that even though you may have to to bring more containers don't put nicely decorated treats on top of each other, even if they are dry at the time, heat could melt your work and smudging occur:( 
3. Decorating for this event was minimal. As you can see we put up a thought provoking poster and then strung some zebra bunting to enhance the African theme along the ceiling. The cookies were also quite a talking point and served as decoration for the food area. We didn't want to detract from the main attraction which was the beautiful handmade products which were really the feature of the entire room.

TRICKS

1. So, how did we get the Uganda shaped cookies? I spent hours cutting them with a butter knife-not! We went online to Ebay wonderful Ebay... and found all sorts of country shape cookie cutters(you can pretty much find any shape under the sun. Everyone loved the cookies they were a simple yet effective addition to the food table. 
2. I think the trick to keeping a party cost effective is to re-use decorations or things from home that fit the theme of the party. The Zebra bunting (which you will see in a post next week) was re-used from a previous special event. The poster "Where you live should no-longer determine whether you live" normally hangs up in Bethany's room. And the cookies ended up being a part of the decorations too. So before you go out and buy or make decorations for your next special event, get creative, take a look around your home (or a friends) and see what you can firstly re-use.

The African Jewelry party was a lot of fun and most importantly awareness and funds were raised for Operation Uganda. Hope you enjoyed the first edition of Froctober. Look forward to partying with you next week.