I’ve always loved hosting parties: thinking of themes, decorations, and menus makes me so excited, despite the intensive cleaning before and inevitably after. Having your own apartment brings about a lot of opportunities for not only learning how to cook and clean on your own, but for hosting parties! Whether you’re thinking about a nice evening with the girls, or a night of no regrets (or memories), here are a few creative party ideas you can easily use in a small apartment living room!
1. Terrarium Planting
This one probably comes from my obsession with the hip plant trends going on right now–everyone gets to go home with their own little plant! Planning is super easy: you can buy glass terrariums for about $1 each, and provide a succulent for each person to choose, dirt, and little plastic toys like gnomes, deer, dinosaurs, etc. to decorate! You can even buy different shapes of terrariums, or provide more options for decorations like moss, pebbles, and rocks. To finish off the details, decorate your apartment with floral-themed wreaths and banners, and you can make a white cake with green frosting plants for dessert!
2. Fondue Night
The magic of fondue is that it consists of generally unhealthy items, which are then dipped into even MORE unhealthy items. It’s beautiful. While it might be better to have an actual chocolate fountain/fondue machine for this, you can just as easily heat up chocolate or cheese on a stovetop, pour it into a bowl, and heat it up every so often if you need to. To make your party even more fun, try thinking of unique ingredients to dip into your fondue, like fortune cookies, pancakes, and cookie dough for chocolate, and steamed vegetables, apples, fries (or any other form of potatoes) for cheese. You can also put more ingredients into the fondue itself, like peanut butter or caramel chocolate, and spinach cheese! The ideas are pretty much endless, and full of delicious dairy.
3. Glow Party
For a more ~wild~ night, have a blacklight party! You can buy black light bulbs pretty much anywhere (party stores, Target, Walmart, etc.), and ask everyone to wear white or neon. In terms of drinks, it’s actually really easy to make glow-in-the-dark drinks using different combinations. Particularly, tonic water, energy drinks, vanilla ice cream, milk, and Mountain Dew are all ingredients that will result in neon drinks, so you can definitely have a lot of options with what general theme you’re thinking for drinks. For color, you can experiment with food coloring and see what happens! If you’re not in the mood for drinking, you can make snow-cones or glowing ice cream sundaes! Use glow sticks on the bottoms of cups or glasses for added glow.
4. DIY Bar
Almost all of the party boards I’ve been stalking on Pinterest have something in common: an adorable DIY bar. With the right settings and decorations, you can make anything cute and Instagram-worthy. My personal favorites have been the hot chocolate, waffle, s’more, popcorn bowl, and trail mix bars. People love to choose what they put in their food (hence the obsession with Chipotle-esque restaurants) and will love all the different options! You can pretty much make anything a DIY bar, and you can choose how much you want to decorate it and how many options to include. Like with the fondue, it’s fun to use ingredients people wouldn’t necessarily expect. For example, for a s’more bar, I used the traditional marshmallows, chocolate, and graham crackers, as well as peanut butter, sprinkles, candy bars, cookies, dark and white chocolate, flavored marshmallows, Nutella, cinnamon, caramel, and pretzels.
5. Appetizer Party
Every year for the Oscars, I buy a bunch of appetizers, open a bottle of wine, and forget to watch the show because I’m talking the whole time. Have everyone make (or let’s be real, buy) their own appetizer and just chill out and eat! Trust me, you won’t need an actual dinner with all the great snacks you can have–Trader Joe’s is prime. If you want to make it more of a formal affair, have everyone dress up and make place settings for everyone!
These are just 5 of pretty much endless fun party ideas that are small enough to fit into your tiny college apartment. Of course, you can always stick to the classic “Ben and Jerry’s in our pajamas drinking a glass of wine and watching 10 Things I Hate About You for the 900th time but still laugh at every scene”, but why not shake it up sometimes? Have fun!
Photos courtesy of The Note Passer, Youtube, and Elle Olive & Co