photo credit: Jac & Jules Photography

Last month, I planned a big event to celebrate the Grand Re-Opening of my beautifully renovated Marriott hotel! As some of you know, I’m proud to be the Sales & Events Manager at this gorgeous hotel. It was a long road for us to get to this point; renovations are quite a process. A huge celebration to share the news with the community and our clients was a must!

I designed the above ‘Before and After’ graphic using Microsoft Powerpoint, saved it as a PDF, and brought it to our local Staples to get this great poster made. We wanted to show off the huge difference in our guest rooms. What better way than to display the before and after photos side by side! Can you believe this is the same hotel?

photo credit: Jac & Jules Photography

photo credit: Jac & Jules Photography

For the big event, we rearranged our lobby to encourage movement and socializing. This area is normally set-up restaurant style, with small tables and chairs. We moved most of those out and replaced them with these great high-top cocktail tables. Our guests loved standing at these tables while watching the live acoustic band. Some guests even danced!

photo credit: Jac & Jules Photography

photo credit: Jac & Jules Photography

I took the lead on the decorating, my favorite part! I recruited a fabulous decorating team, a few members of our regular staff, to help make my vision a reality. Our event color palette was shades of grey with yellow accents, like our new guest rooms. I got this amazing fine paper from Paper Source to make the paper fans. They had such a variety in our colors! Can you believe these gorgeous things started out as a piece of paper?

To craft these- you simply fold two pieces of paper into a flat paper fan (remember making these as a kid?), tie a string around the center to hold the two fans together, and open it up! Once opened, it should form a circle like in the above photo. You just need to use double sided tape to connect the spaces.

photo credit: Jac & Jules Photography