Hunting and Feasting

These are photos from "Hunting and Feasting", the hen's night I organised on Saturday for my very best friend Eko, who is getting married next weekend. I was under a lot of pressure to have something fabulous because the high tea she held for me last year was absolutely perfect! I thought about the things she enjoys most and tried to combine these into an evening of festivities. The dress code was "Colonial Shanghai" and the evening was basically made up of a treasure hunt followed by a banquet dinner at Grand Palace, a lovely Chinese restaurant on the river (which I happened to know Eko had been wanting to visit for a long time!).

23 lovely ladies got themselves all frocked up and met in the Supreme Court Gardens for a treasure hunt and lots of delicious champagne, cupcakes and nibblies. Unfortunately, the weather was inexplicably horrible (a 23-degree, windy, rainy day between two beautiful hot, sunny ones!) but everyone was a very good sport and persevered through it all! For the treasure hunt, I asked everyone to bring a little present for Eko that would fit inside a matchbox (you can see the little matchboxes in the 6th photo down), then I put each matchbox into a paper bag. On the front of each bag was a picture clue that represented the answer to a question about Rick, her groom. So, for example, the answer to the question "Where in the world would Rick most like to live?" was "Barcelona" so the picture was of a Gaudi building. On the back of each bag was the next question, and the bags were hung from trees, benches and so on, so Eko had make her way from clue to clue answering questions, and being rewarded with little presents along the way. There were some lovely little things in the matchboxes and the whole thing worked really well, despite the torrential rain we experienced in the middle of it!

After the treasure hunt, we played a game of "Pin the moustache on Rick" using a poster I had made (and a whole lot of moustaches!), before escaping the cold with a drink at Helvetica. At 7pm we arrived at Grand Palace for our five course banquet meal, which was really delicious and made even more enjoyable by the beautiful views of the river in the background. We all read out what we had written on our little name tags (a sentence that began "I know Eko..."), and played a game where we all wrote down a memory we had of Eko and she had to guess who had written each one. The evening wound up with some of us kicking on to a couple of bars and generally having a good time!

All in all, I think (I hope!) it was a pretty special evening for a very special girl!