50 Years of Memories

My lovely friend Louise had her 50th birthday a couple of weeks ago.  Now I love Louise to bits, but she isn't the easiest person to buy gifts for :(  So, when I stumbled across this pin on Pinterest, I knew that I had to give it a go!

I obviously needed to draft in some help in the form of Louise's daughter Lauren who could sneak relevant information from her Mum's address book, and then we sent emails, made telephone calls and asked as many people as we could think of to write us a memory of Louise so that we could fill 50 envelopes ...

In the week before Louise's big day I was panicking as I didn't have enough memories to fill all the envelopes, but I needn't have worried as two days before, I had an influx of memories ... and ended up having to double up on quite a few envelopes!!!

I bought a tin with the words "Big Love" (thought that was appropriate) that the envelopes just fit in:

and wrapped the gift:

I also made 36 cupcakes for the surprise birthday party, one batch of coffee, one of chocolate and one of vanilla (with pink icing):

Since I knew that the surprise party was taking place, and Louise obviously didn't, I had left my card with Lauren to give to her on the actual day of her birthday (another Pinterest inspired card ... don't know what I did before I discovered Pinterest!!!)

The best news of all though is that Louise had a lovely day, and really enjoyed her 50 Memories, some of which made her laugh out loud and some that made her well up and some that were so lovely that she just smiled.  I was happy that I had managed to pull it all together for such a special friend.

Thanks Pinterest for such great ideas!!!

Carole x