What I Did For My Grad Party + How To Have The CUTEST Grad Party

Grad party season is upon us! As many of you might know, I graduated high school last month, and a couple weekends ago, my best friend and I had our grad party together. I'm going to UT and she's going to OU, so it was the perfect setup for a red river rivalry party... but we both love pink, so we did everything with a pink theme, and everything turned out so cute!

We were very nervous that it might rain, because Texas weather has been crazy lately, but the sun actually came out and the weather was pretty much perfect! It was such a fun party and I'm in love with how everything turned out!

For the food, my mom made these buffalo chicken pinwheels, which were a huge hit. We put these toothpicks in them and I thought it was such a cute touch! We also had a tray of pink & whites from Trader Joe's, a platter of mini pizzas from Trader Joe's (people go CRAZY for these... we kept running out and having to make more), a candy charcuterie board that Eleanor made, a big bowl of fruit, and macarons from Trader Joe's (these were also super popular). We also had a platter of chicken rollups from Costco, but I wouldn't recommend doing those because they weren't as popular. I think people gravitate more towards bite-sized foods so not many people ate these. I put together these cute chalkboard signs for the food so people would know what everything was. For drinks, we kept it simple and had water bottles + pink lemonade. We used plastic cups, white napkins, and these cute pink plates.

For our big dessert, we had Crumbl cookies. I think this is such a fun, unique option, and people went crazy over the cookies! We got a bunch of their flavors of the week (fruit pizza, strawberry shortcake, and samoa) and they were all amazing. Their cookies are huge and they come in the cutest pink boxes, so they looked really pretty on a table. We kept them in a Yeti cooler so the icing wouldn't melt, and then we periodically restocked them.

Every grad party must have a cute backdrop! This year was the year of balloons and wooden pallets. We borrowed these pallets from a friend, got this banner off of Etsy (we customized ours to say "Happy Grad!"), and ordered two pink balloon columns with gold UT and OU balloons. I love the addition of the gold balloons because not many people did something like that, which makes it a bit more unique. I probably would not recommend doing a banner, because in hindsight, the balloon columns made enough of a statement that the banner was a little unnecessary and didn't stand out as much.

For our memory tables, we put our guest books (I got this one from Amazon), soccer jerseys, graduation cords, medals, photo frames, and gift baskets on the tables. We also decorated these wooden pallets with a bunch of 4x6 pictures and put the pallets on top of the tables. This is such a fun way to display all of your memories!

My mom and stepdad made this cute banner that we put on the fence! They used a roll of banner paper and thick poster markers. We also hung our OU and UT flags on the fence.

On their outside fireplace, we put some flowers along with this cute banner from Amazon. We also had this table with an 8x10 pictures and a flower arrangement.

Here's a picture of our flower arrangements all along the table! My mom got a bunch of flowers from Trader Joe's and arranged them all. She did such a great job... someone even asked us what florist we used!

On the other side of their garage, we set up cornhole and foosball. I don't have a picture of this, but I highly recommend setting any game tables out because people really enjoy playing games!

For a more behind-the-scenes look into our party, go listen to this podcast episode where we talked all about the grad party!

Thanks for reading!