This time last year, I was deep in the throws of preparing for our church’s women’s retreat. As in past years, my part was to decorate and add all the little touches that make it special. It’s not the most important part, by far. The Bible teaching and encouragement is the most important. But I do love to bring a little something extra so the ladies can really enjoy the weekend and feel as much love and blessing as possible.
Because of covid regulations last year, we couldn’t take our group to the usual retreat center for the weekend, so we adjusted some things and converted our church auditorium into our retreat center and decorated it for a giant tea party.
Those garlands hung from the ceiling were made using this tutorial. I’ll be using them again this year, getting 2 years for the work of making them once! 🙂
Tables centerpieces were tea sets we gathered from various church ladies who let us borrow them (this helped cut costs and gave us a fun variety of styles from all over the world).
We found these fun paper tea cups on Amazon (not an affiliate link) for them to drink their tea/coffee/cocoa out of.
I made signs to place around the room and these little gift packs were placed at every place. Inside the packet was a small journal for each lady. There were 4 of each design and we used them to separate the ladies into different groups randomly to mix them up a bit.
This is the tea and coffee/cocoa station. One of the ladies on the retreat committee loves tea and has a lot of different ones. She always brings her collection to share (that is what you see on the left) On the right things look a little sparse because the coffee carafes are not there yet.
One of the benefits to being at our church for the retreat this year was that we could do some fun food. Many would not think of this as a good thing, but most years they ask me not to do any food for the retreat because there is so much food already at the retreat center. Well, one of the things I love to do is include food in my theme, so I was thrilled that I could make all sorts of fun “tea party” foods. This was the inspiration I needed to learn to make french macarons (of course there are no pics of those, because these picture were taken of the brunch spread, but I also made them for some of the bridal showers I’ll be sharing in the weeks to come.)
Many of the ladies stepped in to bring parts of the brunch spread, but I wanted to bring some fun things. One of which was this fun “donut” cake. The one in the pic below fell apart, so we made another one, but of course there is no pic of that. My kids were super excited that the first one fell apart because they enjoyed it immensely!
I was super excited to have a reason to make puff pastry danishes. I’d been wanting to after watching The Great British Baking Show. You can find several pins about how to do this on my Tea Party Women’s Retreat board on Pinterest. I practiced for several weeks before making the official danishes for the retreat. They aren’t as hard or as time consuming as I expected. In fact, I need to make more soon! 🙂
The whole retreat was a success with so much spiritual encouragement, so much fun and laughter, and a great time of fellowship and building up! You can find other details and ideas for your own tea party on my Pinterest board.
If you enjoyed this Tea Party Women’s Retreat, I would really appreciate it if you would pin the image below or any of the specific images… or share on other social media! 🙂
You can find me gathering here.
