Amelie-Themed Bachelorette Party

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled down to Memphis for a wedding weekend extravaganza for my dear friend Rebecca.  We kicked the weekend off with a ridiculously fun bachelorette party / lingerie shower that I co-hosted with my friends and fellow bridesmaids Jocelyn and Sheena.  When we brainstormed themes, we nearly immediately decided on Amelie, a French film which is one of Rebecca's absolute favorite movies and absolutely dripping with quirky inspiration for a party. 

Since everyone might not be completely familiar with all the little details of the movie, I've included links to our inspiration.

We kicked things off with an Amelie-inspired invitation.

Our Inspiration

There's the beautiful blushing bride now striking an Amelie-inspired pose...

Our Inspiration

We decked out our food and cocktail set-ups with Paris Metro-inspired signs, and our cocktail list featured French Gimlets and French Martinis -- including virgin versions of both.



Our Inspiration

A little more Paris Metro decor...this one inspired by the signage within the Abbesses stop, which is the stop off of which much of the action in Amelie takes place (and also the stop that I stayed off of when I visited in October!).

Our Inspiration

Because we're sneaky, we got in contact with Rebecca's lovely new husband Andrew and had him identify for us some places of import to them in both Memphis and Nashville.  Then we had him and a Nashville co-conspirator take a little gnome around to the spots in each city and snap some shots.  We formatted them into Polaroids (using these great, free digital frames), printed them off, and displayed them.


Our Inspiration

This little activity here was intended to hit three relevant points: 1) an activity known as Sips and Strokes (which girls love, no?); 2) in the movie, Amelie's neighbor repaints the same Renoir painting over and over again; and 3) Amelie's bedroom dons some pretty adorable prints by Michael Sowa (Fowl with Pearls and Filmhound). I'll admit, I think the subtlety of each of these points may have been lost.  Either way, we had people repaint those prints or paint whatever they wanted.


One of the "games" involved more sneakiness.  In this one, we got Andrew to write Rebecca a little note and take a picture of himself holding it while donning a Zorro hat and mask a la Amelie.  We printed it out, ripped it up, distributed the pieces to the various gifts as gift tags, and had her put it together at the end.  This was a big hit.




Our Inspiration

Since photo booths are all over Amelie, we had to get ourselves one for this shindig.  Using an iPhone, a little tripod, some fancy fabric, and a free photo strip app, we set up a photo booth for folks to go throughout the night and take fun pics (providing the requisite Zorro props, of course).  Once it was over, we uploaded the strips to Flickr and shared them with the group.

  
Our Inspiration

And of course there was a pinata!  It's a party, isn't it?!  So, I whipped up an adorable little goldfish (there's a whole goldfish thing in the movie too, of course) and filled it with naughty things.  Then, the sweet bachelorette had her way with it.  (Yes, this is a porch.  The neighbors probably wondered what the heck was going on.)


Our Inspiration

All in all, an uber-success, if I do say so!

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