Spring brunch with Target (Emily Henderson)

Something happens to your holidays when you have a kid. You go from being a normal person, someone who might book a brunch with friends at a joint with unlimited mimosas, to the person who is at Target WEEKS in advance who gets all ‘Black Friday’ over the last copper leaf egg decorating kit. All of a sudden the holiday turns into this excuse to create important precious memories for you and your child. Memories that you are sure will shape their future, solidify their love for you and most importantly manipulate them into constantly coming home for said holiday when they are grown.

So Easter is on my brain right now. And a couple weeks I hosted a spring blogger brunch with Camila Alves to highlight all the new Spring and Easter Target products. It was such a good excuse to hang out with some bloggers I rarely see and meet some new ladies who have been on my radar.

That’s Camila who was extremely personable and easy to talk to, not to mention beautiful. You might wonder why she is hosting the brunch with me (I did) and it’s because she has a new lifestyle brand where she throws fun, clever, affordable parties. As a mother of 3 and a wife to Matthew McConaughey, she entertains a lot and is now making a business out of throwing such soirees.

This brunch was at Fig and Olive, which was terribly delicious and pretty.

The color palette was just a smattering of pretty pastels, obviously. Caravents was in charge of executing our vision and man did they do it well. Those flowers (by Chaparral Studio) were so pretty. I especially loved how they put moss on those huge bowls to look like grass and then had little bunnies sitting in them. Ridiculously cute.

We drank mimosas. Because all bloggers love to day drink on Mondays.

A man showed up. We all gasped as his masculine testosterone flooded through the doors. It was one Orlando Soria, obviously. His main reason for being there was to make fun of my shirt looking like someone cut off the bottom half of it. He’s not wrong, certainly but I’d hate to find out how much the whole shirt was if I only bought the top half. For the record that shirt has saved my life like 5 times so far. Two press events, 1 video and like 4 social occasions. It was wasn’t cheap but I love it layered over this shirt with these jeans very much.

Everyone arrived at 12:30 and Camila and I greeted them and I got to catch up with each of them individually before we sat down. Also every single one wore something adorable.

The tablescape was pretty darn beautiful. The color palette was pulled back and just bright and colorful, and what we used for the vessels were all from Target and most of them were basics, with some of the new pastel glasses (find them in the store, we couldn’t seem to find them online, sorry!) and the white porcelain and gold eared bunnies.

Again, please note those huge white bowls. They are so great because they are low and you can see over them, but they are big and scale-wise work on a big table like this. I wouldn’t have thought to do the moss/bunny/weed/flower-dripping-out-of-them idea but it just looks so cute. I guess they used chicken wire to create a form underneath then placed simple moss that you can get at Lowes on top. I have so many beautiful bowls, WAYY too many to actually use for food, so this is such a good idea for a tablescape.

Those placecard holders are little bunnies – you can only see the tail side in that photo, but how adorable are those. And yes, they have gold ears, too.

Like most get-togethers its always fun to have some sort of activity so we created a flower arrangement bar so people could leave with a collection of spring flowers of their own. As you can imagine, lifestyle bloggers know flowers. There aren’t a lot of crafts or projects that I would do at a party, but making a simple arrangement for me to take home is something I will always get my hands into.

We provided beautiful spring flowers, paper and twine. And they all got busy.

Thanks Justina, Leanne and Jen for modeling these flower shots just perfectly.

The adorable Ashley from The Style Editrix showed up to do her worst with the flowers, too.

Naturally Justina and Jihan took the flowers to the next level and made crowns out of them, while Kelly and Devon went the more traditional route.

Camila gave a lovely little intro into her background and why she is doing what she does. She was pretty humble because she knew that she was just getting into this social media world and that she could learn a lot from these ladies.

By the way, the one place where it’s not rude to be working on your phone at a meal is a blogger lunch. Everyone was busy filtering their instagram, retweeting, etc.

Another man showed up, we gasped and sighed in delight, and to make sure that his maleness was obvious he wore a gentleman’s hat. That’s Mat Finish, the editorial director of Domaine Home and a new friend of mine.

At the end there were a lot of bunnies that were going to be wasted so they invited me to adopt them and so I did. I’m not one to say no to swag. Ever.

Thanks to all the ladies (and Orlando and Mat) who came to make the brunch extra successful. We all know that your events are only as successful as the people who come to party. In case you are looking for new blogs to follow here were the attendees:

Justina Blakeney, Geronimo Balloons, The Style Editrix, Leanne Barlow, Kelly Golightly, Orlando Soria, Anne Sage, The effortless chic, MLovesMblog.

The whole event was covered over on Domaine Home, where you can find lots of additional styling tips from Camila and I. Thanks, Mat for covering this brunch.

*Event design by Caravents, flowers executed by Chaparral Studio, Photos by the lovely Tessa Neustadt