our service soiree complete

On Saturday, our dining room was converted into a Valentine factory.

In case you missed the planning post, we invited friends to casually drop in on Saturday evening to make homemade Valentines, mingle,and enjoy dessert and champagne. All the Valentines will be taken to a local children's home and women's emergency shelter.

About 16 people "dropped in" to contribute.

To set up, we completely covered the dining room table with newspaper and taped it down with painter's tape, hung Valentines on a twine "garland" in the window to dry, and spread the supplies down the center of the table for easy access.

Our list of recipients included lots of women and little girls-- definitely the easiest gender to create Valentines for. You just have to pursue one of these goals: pretty, colorful, dainty, sparkly.

But the elementary-high school boys on the list were a little more challenging.

For those, we ended up pulling from history, nature, and sports magazines (one of our neighbor's ideas). We tried to glue fun facts and short articles into their Valentines. The Smithsonians' monthly feature on "This Month in History" provided a lot of concise fun-fact fillers.

After everyone left, Husband and I sat flipping through the Valentines. The two pewter buckets that started the evening stark empty were brimming with over 100 homemade messages for lonely, neglected individuals we will likely never meet. Each of these cards will go to someone no different in biological makeup than ourselves but whose life has unfolded so differently. I hope these cards can bring them joy, even if just a little.

As we sat considering the profound implications of having new friends (people we've known for less than a year) respond so openly and joyfully to such a bizarre invitation simply because they want to help whenever the opportunity arises, we felt the full impact of the words, 

Our cups [or pewter buckets] runneth over
with goodness and joy and all the blessings of fellowship and service.

Thank you to everyone who helped Share the Love for this project! It was fun, productive, and altogether sweet ;)

Now, if only I could stop eating these leftover sweets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner...

For the dessert table, we served:

Lemon-Cream Sandwich Cookies

Dark Chocolate-Raspberry Cake Balls (recipe to come)

and Red Velvet Cheesecake Squares